 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year the event is virtual. We're bringing all the people on theCUBE from where they are and really happy to bring back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Paul Cormier, who is the president and CEO of Red Hat. Of course, the keynote and you and I spoke ahead of the show. Paul, great to see you and thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure, always great to see you Stu, my pleasure. All right, so Paul, lots have changed since last time we got together for summit. One thing stayed the same though. So, you know, the big theme I heard in your keynote, you talked about open hybrid cloud, of course. We've been talking about cloud for years when you ran the product theme, you know, making Red Hat go everywhere is something that we've watched, you know, that move. Is anything different when you're talking to customers, when you're talking to the product teams, you know, you think about the times we're in, you know, why is open hybrid cloud, you know, not a buzzword, but, you know, huge and important in the times we're facing? Because, you know, the big premise to open hybrid cloud is, you know, customers, you know, cloud has become part of people's infrastructure. I've seen very few, if any, true enterprise customers that are moving everything, every app to one cloud. And so, you know, I think what people really realized once they started implementing cloud as part of their infrastructure was that you're going to always have applications that are running bare metal, some are virtual machines, maybe on top of VMware, you might spin up a private cloud and that would be people saying, you know what, the public clouds are also different from each other. I might want to run one application for whatever reason one and a different one or another. And I think they started to realize the actual operational cost of that, the security cost of that, and even more importantly, the development cost of that from the application perspective and now having five silos out there how that's so costly. So now, our whole premise since the beginning of open hybrid cloud has been to give you that level playing field to have those things all the same no matter where the application was, whether it's bare metal, virtual machine, private, multiple public cloud. So in the long run, as customers start to start to really build a cloud first application development and they can still manage that under one platform in a common way, but at the same time manage the developer secure, but at the same time, they can manage, develop and secure their legacy applications that are also on Linux as well in the same way. So I think in the long run, it really brings it together and saves it on money and efficiency in those areas. Yeah, I always love, I look over time, we have certain words that we think we know what they mean and then they mature over time. We'll start with the first piece of what you're talking about, open. We live through those of us that have been through that the really ascendancy of open source is, in the early days, open was free and we joked it was free like puppies, but today, open source, of course, is very prevalent, we see it all over the place, but give from an open hybrid cloud why open is important today and how do customers think about that today? There's probably two most misunderstood things with open. So first thing is that open source is a development model, first of all. I always say it's a verb, not a noun. I even say, both internally and externally, we're not an open source company, we're an enterprise software company with an open source development model. So you think about that. That's what that's really important. Why is the open source development model so important? It's important because everyone has the same opportunity in terms of the features within the code. Everyone has the same opportunity to contribute. The best technology wins. That's how it works in the upstream community is it's not a technology driven by one company that may have a one company agenda. It's really a development process that allows the best technology to win. And I think that's one of the main things and one of the main reasons why you've seen all of the innovation, frankly, in the last five years around infrastructure and development, the associated pieces and tools around that of being in and around Linux because Linux was available, it was powerful, it was open. When people wanted to develop for any, when people wanted to develop Kubernetes, for example, they had to make changes to the Linux kernel in order to do that. They didn't work because they could. And so those are the things that make it really important as a development model. And I think those are the things that get infused a lot. I think the other things that get infused is a lot of people think that, hey, if I have this great technology and I just open source it'll all just work, everyone will come. No, that's not the case. The things that really, projects that really succeed from an open source perspective are the problems that are common and horizontal across a big group of people. So they're trying to solve similar problems. And that's one of the things that we found. As you go further up the stack, typically the less community is involved. It's the horizontal layers where you need, whether you're in banking or retail or telco or whatever, they're all the same. Those are the pieces where open source really fits well. All right, so the second piece, you talk about hybrid, I think back to the early days, Paul, when cloud was first defined and we talked about public and private cloud, we had discussions of hybrid clouds and multi-clouds. And the concern that I have is it was very much an infrastructure discussion and it was pieces. And the vision that we always have is where customers to actually get value is the total solution needs to be more valuable than the sum of its parts. So it's really about hybrid applications. It's about where my data lives. So, do you agree with some of those things I'm saying? How does Red Hat look at it? And from your team, I do get lots of the application and app dev discussion, which I always find even more meaningful than arguing over ontologies of how you build your cloud. Everything you said is accurate. It's all about the application. I mean, if you look at just where we started with Linux just alone, what did Linux bring to the enterprise? When we first started rallying, you and I talked about this earlier, that was the thing that really opened things up. The enterprises started buying Linux, right? They started buying Linux, our Linux for $29.95 at the bookstores. But when I first came on board and we talked to some of the banking customers in there, they said, well, we love this technology, but every time you guys change or release all my applications break or when I get new hardware, it doesn't work, et cetera, et cetera. So it's all about the application. It's all about the application. Linux has been about that all the time from the beginning of time. What hybrid really means here is that I can run that seamlessly across wherever that footprint is going to live. And so I think that's also one of the things that gets confused a bit. You know, when the cloud first started, the cloud vendors were telling people that every application was going to move to one cloud tomorrow, right? We knew that was not practical. That's the other thing from open source developers. We look at a practical perspective. Back in, we look back in, back in 2007, I just looked at this to prepare for the note I just put out to the company. Back in 2007 at the summit, I talked about any application anywhere, any time. That's really the essence of what hybrid is here. So what we found here is what every application is impractical for every application to move to one cloud. And so cloud is powerful, but it's become part of people's development and operations and security environment. So now as we stitch that in, make that common for those three things. So the operation, security and development or application development world, that's where the power is. So I see the day where application developers and application users won't know or care what platform the back end data is coming from for whatever applications they're writing. They shouldn't care. That should just happen seamlessly under the covers. But I think that complicates thing and that's why management needs to be retooled with it as well. Sorry on that, but I could talk about that for three days, right? Yeah. So as an industry, we kind of argue about these and everybody feels they understand the way the future should look. So Paul, for a number of years, it was we're going to build this stack and let's have the exact same stack here and there. There were some of the, you know, big iron companies that did that a few years ago. Now you see some of your public cloud partners saying we can give you that same experience, that same hardware, you know, all the way down to the chip level, things are going to be the same. When I look at software companies, you know, there's two that come to mind to live across dispersed environments. One is very much from a virtualization standpoint, they design themselves to live on any hardware out there. Red Hat has a slightly different way of looking at things. So what's your take on kind of the stack and, you know, why is hybrid in that hybrid cloud model that you're building, you know, probably looks and sounds and feels different than I think almost anybody else out there? Well, you know, the cloud guys, they all have similar technologies underneath. I mean, it's most of it's not all of it's based on Linux, but they're all different. I mean, remember the UNIX days? I'm old enough to remember the UNIX day. That was the goal back then. But each, like each hardware vendor did, each cloud vendor is now taking that Linux or the associated pieces with it and they have to make their changes to adapt to their environment. And some of those changes, some of those changes don't allow for applications to be portable outside that environment. That's exactly like the OEM world of the past. And so, I mean, I know some people hate it when I say this and make this a comparison, but I really look at the cloud guys as a mainframe. And certainly mainframe as and still does bring a ton of value to a certain customer base. And so, if you're going to keep your application in that one place, a mainframe mentality will always stitch it together better. But that's not the reality of what customers are trying to do out there. So, I really think you have to look at it that way. It's not that much different in concept anyways to the OEM days from when they started running Linux. And the thing that Red Hat's done that some of the others have it, for VMware, for example, VMware, they have no pieces that touch the application. I mean, they have some now. They had Photon, you know, they had some of the other pieces that sort of touched, that tried to touch the application. But at the end of the day, we always concentrated in Linux and especially from a Red Hat perspective of keeping the environment the same, both from an application perspective and from a hardware perspective. Certainly when an application runs in the cloud, we don't have to worry about the hardware anymore, but we still have to worry about the application. And businesses are all about the application. And so, we always took that tack from both sides of that. I think that's one of VMware's weaknesses, frankly, is that applications don't run on hypervisors. They run on operating systems, including when I say operating systems, I mean containers because that is a Linux operating system. Yeah, Paul, a lot of good points you brought up there. And it's interesting, the mainframe analogy in the early days of cloud, there were some that would throw stones and saying, right, you're rebuilding the mainframe and you're going to be locked in. You know, this is going to be your environment. So I'd love to get your thoughts. You think about what's happening in application development, the rise of, as you talked about containers and Kubernetes, serverless is out there, there's that. We want to enable the application developers, but we don't want to get locked into some platform there. Talk about Red Hat's role, how your products are helping to ship, help customers make sure that they can take advantage of some of these new ways of building and maintaining and changing without being stuck on any specific platform or technology. Well, the first place, I believe, you know, I'm sure I will be corrected on this, but we really are the only company that I can think of at this moment that is 100% open source. Everything we do in our products is open source based, goes back upstream to the community for everyone to take advantage of. So that's the first thing. I mean, the second thing we do is, you know, one of the big fallacies is open source has become so popular that people are confusing upstream projects with downstream products. And so for us, I'll use us as an example. I'll use Linux and I'll use Kubernetes as an example. You know, Linux, the Linux kernel, we all build from the Linux kernel. Us, SUSE, Ubuntu, we all build from the Linux kernel. But at the end of the day, we all make choices when we bring that upstream work down to become a product. In our case, we go upstream to rel. We go from Fedora to sent us to rel. We all make choices, which file systems we're going to package, what development environment we're going to package, what packages we're going to package. And so when we get down to what's get deployed in the enterprise, those choices and what makes the difference of why rel is slightly different than SUSE Linux, which is slightly different in canonicals of Ubuntu, but they're all come from the same heritage. The same as the case with Kubernetes. Is this sort of fallacy that Kubernetes is, the last time I checked, there was 127 different Kubernetes vendors out there. They're all just going to magically work together. Yes, they all come from the same place, but we have to touch the user space. We have to touch the kernel. And so how you line that up in the life cycle of what the customers get is going to be different. We might be able to take different pieces from those 127 and make it work at one point. But the first time any of us makes a change that's not coordinated with the other side, it's probably going to break. And our life cycles go out 10 plus years. And so engineering that all together is something that makes it all work together as you upgrade, whether it be hardware or your applications. And so some people confuse that with not being open, still a hundred percent open. When we find a bug in rel, rel that's been out there for five years maybe, we give that fix back to the upstream community. That's open. It's out there. And so I think that's the part that opens us. It becomes so, so, so accepted now in so much part of the mainstream now that we've very much confused projects with products. And so that's one of the biggest confusion points out there. Yeah, really good points there, Paul. So when I think about some of the things that we've heard over the years is, in the original days it was, oh, well, public cloud, Paul, I'm not going to need Red Hat anymore. They've got Linux. Then Kubernetes has come along and Red Hat's had a really strong position, but you look at it and you say, okay, well, if I'm most customers, if I'm doing Amazon, if I'm doing Google, if I'm doing Microsoft, I'm probably going to end up using some of their native services that they've got built in. Talk about how the role of Red Hat kind of continues to change. And you live in this multi-cloud environment and I think it's kind of that intersection that you were talking about, open and compatibility as opposed to, you're not saying that Red Hat's going to conquer the world and take down all the other options. Well, of course not. The cloud providers bring a ton of value. They bring a ton of value. I think the users have to be smart on how and when they use that value. If you truly are going to be a hundred percent of your applications in one public cloud, then you probably will get the best solution from that one public cloud. Serverless is a great example. If you're an Amazon and you spin up via serverless, that container that gets spun up is never going to run outside that cloud. If that's okay with you, that's okay with you. The way we've gone about this is, as I said, to give you that seamless environment all the way across. If you want to run just containers in one particular cloud vendor and you want it under their Kubernetes and it's never going to run in any other place, that's okay too. But if you're going to have an environment with applications that are in multiple cloud vendors, infrastructures, even on your own, you're now going to have to spin up these different silos of that technology, even though the technology has the same heritage. So that's a huge operational and development cost as you grow bigger and able to do that. And so our strategy is very, very simple. It's give the developers, operations and security people that common environment to work across. And over time, they shouldn't care where the services are coming from. It should just all work. And that's why you're seeing things like automation being so important now. I mean, automation is our biggest growing business with Ansible right now. And part of the reason is as people spread out to a container-based environment, applications may now spread across those different footprints. You know, maybe you want to have your front, we have one of the rail customers in Europe that has the front-facing customer side of their ticketing system out in the public cloud. And they've got the back-end financial transaction database pieces that clear credit cards behind their firewall. That's really one application spread across containers. If you want to have to manage the front end of that with one Kubernetes and the back end of that with a different Kubernetes, probably not. And so that's really what we bring to the table as we've really grown with this new technology. All right, so final question I have for you, Paul. I'm actually going to get away a little bit from your background on the product piece. Have to talk a little bit about just Red Hat going forward. So, you know, you talked about, you know, we know for many years Red Hat has been much more than the Linux piece, you talked about automation. I've got some great interviews this week talking about some of the latest in application development, lots of open source projects, so many open source projects, nobody can keep them all straight there. So as customers, you know, look at strategic partnerships, you know, what is the role of Red Hat? And, you know, with now being under, you know, IBM, Jim Whitehurst steps over to become president there. Arvind, of course, had a long relationship and was the architect behind the Red Hat acquisition. You know, what's the same and what's different as we think about Red Hat 2020 under your leadership? I think it's a lot of the same. I mean, I think the difference becomes in the world we're in right now is sort of how we can help our customers come out of back into re-entry, right? And so how that's going to be different than the past is, you know, is still, you know, we're working through that with many of our customers. And we think we can be a big help here because we run their business, you know, today. Well, they run their business, but we're the platforms that run their business. And that's not going to go away for them, for them, in fact, if anything, that's going to get even more critical for them because they've got to get more automation to get just more efficiency out of it. So in terms of what we do in, as a company, that's not going to change at all. I mean, we've been on this path that we're on for a long time. I, you know, I stand up in front of our sales kickoffs every year. This year we did virtual as well. And I say, I'm going to talk to you about the strategy. Guess what? It hasn't changed much from last year. It's, you know, and that's a good thing because these technology rollouts are multi-year rollouts. So we're going to continue on that. I mean, the other thing too is our customers are seeing, are moving many more of their workloads to the Linux environment. And so I think we can help them expand that as well. And I think from an IBM perspective, I mean, IBM, I mean, the big premise, one of the big premises here from our perspective is to help us scale because they're in the process of helping their customers move to this next generation architectures and at the same time be able to support the current architectures. And that's what we do well. And so they can just help us get to places that we just wouldn't have had the time and the resources maybe to get on our own. So we can expand that footprint even more quickly with IBM. So that's the focus right now is to really help our customers move to the next phase of this in terms of re-entry. Yeah, as I've heard you and many other Red Hatter say, Red Hat is still Red Hat. And definitely it's something that we can see loud and clear at Red Hat Summit 2020. Thank you so much, Paul. Thank you Stu, nice to see you again. All right, lots of coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. Be sure to check out the cube.net for the whole back catalog that we have of Paul, their customers, their partners. And thank you for so watching the cube.