 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco with theCUBE, CUBE coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 in Moscone West in San Francisco. I'm John Troy, co-host of theCUBE with my co-host this week, Analyst John Troyer, who's the co-founder of Tech Reckoning, advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Mike Ferris, the vice president of business development at Red Hat and business architecture, sitting on the table doing all the deals. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Great to be here, happy to have you coming on us. So Red Hat has always played the long game in its business. You got a very community focus, so it's got a lot of data in front of you, you got a lot of customers. But now the industry deals are forming. IBM deal you guys announced here and Microsoft two notables, really kind of are a tell-tale sign of what's to come. What does it mean? You had two big enterprise players getting behind OpenShift and Red Hat. So it means coming of age of both containers and industry standards around this. And so similar to what we did with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it started at the edge of network computing and eventually through relationship with IBM, Dell, HP became the standard hardware enabler. Applications then came on board with partners like Oracle and others going through SAP and the like. Now we're seeing the same thing happen in the container space, where now that Kubernetes has been established as the orchestration standard in the industry, Red Hat has made the bet, adopted on that and now starting to see the fruition of people standardizing around that. The major players, the cloud providers from IBM, Microsoft and applications that's sitting on top of that are starting to see this as the platform that they want to deploy on. And just to kind of point out, just because you mentioned Kubernetes, you guys weren't Johnny come lately on Kubernetes either. You guys made the investment years ago and you saw Kubernetes, you saw containers. So it wasn't like who it's like yesterday. It developed. Absolutely. I mean, OpenShift was actually launched in 2011 and then in 2013 we made the switch to Kubernetes and made the bet on it as being the orchestration standard. And as you saw Red Hat do with KVM and the hypervisor space, certainly designing everything around a standard that we could support for, in the case of Linux up to 10 years, we're doing the same type of thing and making the platform the focus, not the individual technology. So applications that are developed, ISVs that are focused with those customers on deploying those and now with major partners like IBM and Microsoft saying, this is the thing that is going to live and breathe in your enterprise as you take existing applications, moving them into the cloud native and space, as well as also when you start building new applications on a fresh platform. You have business architecture in your title. I want to talk about business architecture because with cloud scale, business logic is where the innovation is and then using technology to scale that. But you also have, it's not always the best technology sometimes that makes the fit. It could be the right technology at the right time and Jim White mentioned that earlier in his interview today. Business architecture is about the win-win scenarios and open source as well as the commercialization piece. Can you comment on the preferred architecture of folks who want to go to the cloud and take advantage of the transformation happening? How should they architect their business? How should they think holistically around putting the pieces together, whether it's vendor relationships rolling out and hiring new developers and moving to a cloud native cloud scale while preserving their existing investments? So just like when we started with Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2002, the focus has been on making sure that customers have choice as they do this. And it's the platform that matters and making sure that you have the scalable, secure environment that you can run across these. And so taking that choice theme on a standardized platform and starting to be able to say, regardless of what application you have, where you need to be run or what services you need to plug in, you need to make sure those are available everywhere. So when we talk to architects and business architects that are looking at pricing models and mechanisms, these two things are now forefront in their design architectures when they start sitting down. And so our focus has been, how do we enable this common platform, starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift across every major cloud provider in the world and on-premise as those models start to change? And so one of the announcements that we made was we're going to be supporting OpenShift on Azure Stack. This opens up choice for those customers to be able to say, regardless of on-premise on a Red Hat OpenStack environment or a Azure Stack environment or off-premise at major providers like IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure now, being able to say that I've got the support across these architectures and the multiple business models that I want to be able to purchase that allow me to enter into this space. Mike, I want to drill down in that, the Microsoft announcement. Because it's multifaceted, right? It's not just like you could run OpenShift on Azure Stack, on-prem if you wanted to, right? It's a managed service on Azure itself. It's also integrated into some of their offerings like in our SQL Server will be a Red Hat certified container as well as being a container over on their side and they're building it into their Dev programs and Dev tools, right? That you'll get Red Hat credits as well if you're sitting there at the Microsoft tool set. So can you talk a little bit about some of those points of contact, maybe expand on them? Sure, absolutely. And so I think kind of a core point to recognize is, for many years now, we've been talking about containers as a packaging, right? Well, it's actually what's in the container that matters. And so from the perspective of that, the position is containers are Linux and Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so when we start talking about this, the foundation of this really starts from that angle. And so with Microsoft, we actually announced last fall that we're going to do OpenShift dedicated, which is the Red Hat managed service on Amazon and Google. We announced we're going to be taking that to Microsoft Azure as well. But in the course of those discussions sitting down with customers, talking to the Microsoft teams, it became readily apparent that if we partnered on this and did something much more aggressive to build a higher value solution for the customer, we could actually deliver something that customers saw as not just a unified approach, but actually a Microsoft offering. And so what we announced yesterday and what Microsoft jointly announced with us was that we're announcing the release and the upcoming release of OpenShift on Azure, which is a jointly managed and operated and supported OpenShift service. It's actually the industry's first jointly managed service on a public cloud. And so when we look at this, customers now can go to Microsoft, get a first-party offering from them, be able to deploy their applications, have Microsoft run the infrastructure, Red Hat run the OpenShift platform, and have that service really available so they can focus on the applications and not the infrastructure. Who gets the support on that? Is it the Microsoft leading on the front lines? Are you guys splitting the duties there? How's that working? So on the support side, in 2015, we announced something called integrated hybrid support with Microsoft, where we actually had Red Hat Associates on site in Redmond working side-by-side with Microsoft support personnel. This extends that, but what we're also doing is with the OpenShift on Azure offering, it's actually going to be a Microsoft first-party product. They're going to be selling in the market. We will be selling in the market. And so customers can call Microsoft as their first line, but if they happen to call Red Hat, we've got this back-end infrastructure. We know how to escalate. We've got joint ticketing systems. We know actually how to work on this together. So it is a combination. Call it a hybrid support model. So you're standing in the previous model that you've just worked on. Absolutely. Not like a branding brand new thing. Yeah, but customers who are large-scale Azure users today will still call Microsoft and they'll be able to get to the right people through their Microsoft reps. So I think one of the impacts that I see when I get your reaction on this is that obviously that multi-cloud has been a big discussion. And it's a future state, but that's what everyone wants choice, right? So they're doing a lot of work on-premise and cloudifying their architecture. This has been a big part of today's world. This seems to be a multi-cloud opportunity for your customers. Is that kind of where you see the vain value? Yeah, so when we look at the platform, we want the platform to be consistent, whether it's Red Hat Enterprise Linux and now OpenShift. And have that available in a consistent way, in a consistent price point and a consistent value representation to the customers regardless of where they want to go. And so we've got customers that will have a primary cloud and on-premise or a primary cloud and a backup and an on-premise. And it's very important for their applications, for their development life cycles and for their support mechanisms that they have one place to go, one place to work with and focus on a singular platform. And that's why when we hear us talk about this, we're doing the exact same thing we did with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We're not varying the technology, we're integrating it deeper. And in this case, Microsoft very deeply in their infrastructure, but providing the same value to customer above the line and then backing it with this jointly operated and managed service from Microsoft. And containers has been a great tailwind for your business big time. How has OpenShift success changed your job in the past year? Or at all, it's made it a lot harder because I think the evolution of containers, evolution early on of the orchestration space, people have been asking about, all right, are you following the community? How close to the Kubernetes latest release are you? That was a dialogue that we're now evolving in the industry to being how can I get the services that I need? How do I get the support that I need? And how do I make sure it actually is secure? And that when the next major issue comes out that all my containers are up to date. And so the complexity is increased from the perspective of we're no longer talking about certification of an ISV on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which happens to be certified on specific hardware. Now we're talking about living and breathing container life cycles from ISVs from in customers, sitting on a platform that runs across all the public clouds. And when the next security issue happens, how do we make sure that the ISVs containers, the end customers applications that are containers, all in Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers, that they actually are secured the moment that we release the patch across these. And that's really the value. And getting that across in the industry and being able to say that all of that works in concert with the new business models, consumption and other things, those are the complexities we're having to deal with now. Definitely a sign of 2018, right? In some ways the world has come to Red Hat, right? Red Hat has kept its open culture and open ethos. Certainly this is a signal of the new Microsoft, right? Playing with Red Hat. Red Hat now also gets to support Windows containers. I mean, IBM, although has been a supporter of open source and Linux and Red Hat for years. So it is, I love the new world that a lot of our old assumptions are thrown away, right? And it's about delivering value to customers, not necessarily what tribe you're at. Yeah, and you see IBM, I mean, that has had a long play in the container space. I mean, starting with the Bluemix environments and kind of moving into the latest thing with IBM Cloud Private. You know, from our perspective, it's this unifying nature that says, now that we can actually calm down and talk about what does enterprise need and how long it is and how do we build relationships with IBM and with Microsoft that can really provide that so the customers can get the services they need. And the complexity you're talking about on your job is going to be an ecosystem opportunity for you, and then making more people come into the table to Red Hat. So I think you have a great opportunity in the ecosystem as well. A final question for you is if someone's watching this video and they say, hey, I want to do a deal with Mike. I mean, how are you doing deals? How do you evaluate? Is it community-driven? Is it organic, top-down? Or is there a certain way that people can engage with you in Red Hat to do a business deal? Or is it an ecosystem trip? Just take a minute to explain the rules and things. So the first thing we always look at is what are customers asking for and how can this help the community, right? Those are the two things that drive the discussions at the CEO level with these partners that we're dealing with and even emerging markets. I mean, I sit down with small managed service providers and they want to offer open shift services in the same way that they've been doing Red Hat Enterprise Linux services for years. And it's about the customers that are coming to them saying, I see this as the platform. I want to modernize my existing applications or start cloud native development using these. How can we sit down and have the conversation? So frankly, from our perspective, customers are key and so is the community. And as long as we can have those two balances with the relationships, it's great. And you mentioned the standardization. When you have that kind of momentum in the industry and the communities, it's going to enable a lot of opportunities. And certainly you guys are doing great job. So you got a lot of, you're a busy guy. Yep, absolutely. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your insights, business development action going on at Red Hat. Big notable deals, IBM and Microsoft, just one of many Red Hat continues to be open, doing it all out in the open. It's theCUBE, we're out in the open here in the middle of Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer. Stay with us for more day two coverage of three days of live Red Hat Summit coverage. We'll be right back. Stay with us.