 Everyone, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, we strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by cohost, dominiman at wikibon.org, and our next guest is Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of the Infrastructure, Business Group at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. So we've been geeking out all week, and first of all, I'm in my element because I love talking about software operating systems and innovations, kind of like the perfect storm to have these conversations. And Red Hat has done some amazing work, but now it's even more compelling because now the open source stage has been set. The foundation is not only secure, it's a tier one infrastructure opportunity with scale out open source hardware, with open compute and commodity just exploding. It's horizontally disrupting everything. And infrastructure as a service is stable at some level now where cloud is starting to see that bridge being built and it's happening in real time. So I want to get your take, that's your role. Where are we with this? What's your take on where Red Hat is now in that construction of taking that infrastructure to hyperscale, large scale, with all the benefits of DevOps and application developers getting the mojo that they need to be faster, smarter, and better software? Sure, well, you know, one of the things that you'll hear us talk about a lot is our focus on enabling customers to build and deploy hybrid clouds. And in our mind, hybrid clouds are structured in such a way that you define the workloads and you have a natural relationship between those workloads and the deployment model. So, you're going to have customers who will continue to have single server bare metal deployments, classic virtualization all the way through private and public clouds. And what we want to do for some foremost is enable that model to be natural. Pick the deployment model that best fits the workloads and then help you evolve to make whatever of those more efficient. It's really difficult. I mean, I've been in the enterprise business for a very long time going back to my early days at HP and IBM and back in the old days it was easy, you buy a system, you have an environment, you buy it, you deploy it, you pay for it, amortize it and everything's happy, you got an IT department. But now, you as the supplier side have to think about all the multitude of use cases. That's right. It's very challenging. So, how do you get your arms around that as a company mentally, one? And what are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to give that flexibility so that whatever you workload, you mentioned workloads, there's no one workload anymore. You got virtualization, that's a nice little bonus shot in the arm, so to speak. Is containers that magic? Well, it's a great question. So, I think at a philosophical level, first and foremost we embrace diversity. So, we know that customers' environments are complex and what we see our role is doing is making that complexity as manageable as possible. So, from the standpoint of our infrastructure strategy, there's really sort of four tenets to it. The first is taking those community-driven innovative technologies like OpenStack and making them mission-critical and consumable for enterprises, what we're right at historically known for, make the core platform bulletproof. What you heard a lot about this week was what we're also doing at the application enablement layer, including containerization of apps. And the goal there is to create a simple application development and deployment model that can transcend any one of those deployment styles all the way from single-server bare metal to public cloud. So, we simplify the development and deployment of applications. The third key unique element is our storage offering and that gives a single name and application to where its data is located. It's conversing to a single name space, could be inside, outside, doesn't matter where the application lives, it understands the storage. And that really adds- Log or object, independent? Yeah, and we're adding all of that consistent with the OpenStack framework. And then the fourth thing is providing a single management framework, in our case cloud forms, that it's classic virtualization, open-stack environments inside or outside of the firewall, as well as being able to manage not just right at the point infrastructure, but also VMware as it's installed or Microsoft as it's installed. So those pieces really form the unique elements of our open hybrid cloud vision. And even if you think about the management framework, how complex that is, he said inside, outside, virtual, non-virtual. Absolutely. I mean cloud. And then the deployment on the app enablement bare metal to cloud, I mean, automation and orchestration seem to be the hot button in all of this. Absolutely. Where does that fit in? Where are we with that? It's done on an advancement basis. So of course a lot of that is enabled directly with the OpenStack framework. And as I mentioned, in our case cloud forms brings all those kinds of capabilities of provisioning, orchestration, monitoring, billing and the like to that diverse heterogeneous environment. So you can have a single view of all your resources, understand how they're performing and how you can migrate them across. Whether it's again, right on infrastructure or others as well. Talk about containers. Obviously Docker was on, we had the founder Solomon. It's great to talk to founders because it's not like the HBO special and what it's like at Silicon Valley. He's the real deal. Built a company, started it from scratch, grew it and now he's funded, super-funded Jerry Chen, great CUBE alumni, friend of ours. But containers, the timing is right. I mean, it's not a new concept. Is this one of the things where timing is everything? Well, I think, I think, certainly there's an element to that, but I think what they've done is two important things. One is taken full advantage of the existing container concepts, but also enabled a very elegant model for integrating and composing applications that are using multiple Docker images. And I think what you're going to see is an index built up of pre-built Docker images. It's going to really facilitate the construction of composite applications in a way that's much easier than it's actually before. So I think it's great timing because it's a perfect model for unwrapping applications into the cloud and also some technical innovation that we're collaborating on that actually make the applications that much more robust as well. So what's your take on the overall operating system of the future? Software-defined data centers, all the rage right now, I knew you were talking, it's certainly a marketing angle for VMware and others in the past, but that's the software-centric business model is something that's your heritage. Right. It's like, okay, how do you guys play in all that? You guys see that as just new territory, existing territory, opportunity? We see it as an extension of where we've been with customers for a long time. So, you know, we started obviously with REL back in the day, you know, made that, you know, the standard for Linux deployments, likewise have moved on to virtualization. So we see it as a continuum and our job is to enable customers to move forward on the cloud maturity curve, if you will, but it doesn't mean necessarily get them all the way to public cloud with everything they're going to do, that's just not going to happen. It's again, you know, get them to a natural place where workloads are deployed on the infrastructure that makes no sense, but give them the flexibility to change their minds if they got it wrong or if they want to move on. We had Ranga on earlier talking about storage and I liked his quote. He said, we have the triple play on cloud, software-defined, compute, network, and storage. What's your take on that trend? I mean, software-defined networking has been well-defined and necessarily set the tone of that when they were bought by VMware two years ago, but now, you got storage and compute going that way. What does that mean? What does software-defined storage and compute mean? Well, I think it's a recognition that innovation is happening in software in many ways faster than hardware and it's easier to accelerate those innovations on industry standard platforms. So I think there's a level of inevitability around software-defined star that we're obviously in the business of enabling and accelerating. So in each of those cases, we want to be a core enabler. We're going to work upstream to help, even if we're not intending to productize things ourselves. So we're active in all of those communities and helping to push innovation, do what we can. So what's your take on that? I want to get your personal professional opinion on this. It's more of like, put back in time and let's look forward. Kind of like both bounce back and forth. So all the people who have made a lot of money in the old way of infrastructure, stack, rack and servers, you mentioned bare metal. You know, Dell was even on here saying, hey, we understand the world's shifting. HP is here, IBM, you met Microsoft on the software side. You have some people who have some entrenched business models, okay? That has to evolve fast. What is the key thing that they have to evolve into? Not just those guys, but just in general from a macro landscape standpoint, what is this, what's this megatrend going on? Can you describe it from an infrastructure standpoint? Whether it's converge, you get flash, all kinds of stuff going on. What is going on and what needs to be, what's the evolution model? Well, from a business model perspective, you know, you're certainly seeing companies wanting to consume and pay for only what they need and have great flexibility in doing that. And a lot of the traditional business models, going back to perpetual licensing, sort of worked completely in the antithesis of that. So Red Hat's been a subscription company from day one. I like to say it keeps us honest because our customers have the ability to vote with their feet every 365 days. And so it keeps us aggressive in terms of participating in communities to drive innovation and be disciplined at the same time about how we bring that in and productize it. I think it's a model we've- You've got to have the kind of support in the life cycle and that's critical, right? I mean, multi years, decades. Right, I mean, you look at a technology like OpenStack today. You have the cadence of innovation in the upstream every six months, incredible new technologies. And we see our job as pulling from that, building a mission critical solution, ensure that applications are certified to that, and then provide a very long support life. And our strategy of course there is, we'll continue to extend the support life as the technology continues to mature. Do you guys worry that you're not doing enough for OpenStack? Well, we're doing everything we can. I think we remain the number one committer. But I will say- I'm not trying to suggest you're not. I know you're guys are number one, but I mean, OpenStack is the deal right now. It's all about OpenStack, right? I mean, this is what everyone's talking about. IBM put a billion dollars down, kind of set the Jell-O, I call it the Jell-O analogy, put it in the refrigerator at some point it forms. You're happy, right? You know, they did a billion dollars, made that Jell-O, made that happen. You guys are in a way of the new IBM, right? But you're in, it's not just money, it's everything else. So you're seeing that new OpenStack needs some, you know. So we like to think of ourselves as being, you know, the red hat of OpenStack. Much like we're the red hat of Linux. No, just do so earlier. Yeah, so that's exactly our view. And we bring a lot of the same philosophy to bear. Now it's a much more complex environment and a lot of the pieces are moving very quickly. So my comment about, you know, feeling like maybe we're not doing enough, it's not for what we're trying, it's because there's so much opportunity in so many areas where you can see the paths to innovation. So, you know, from that we decide, what do we bring uniquely to the table? You know, we put our talent, you know, to bear there, but also try to be catalysts of those communities to ensure that we're getting the world control. Tim, to that point, you know, there's certain areas where I look at where it's great that red hats contributed to the OpenStore community, but it's your ecosystem that might benefit from more. So for example, you guys are very active in the Open Daylight Initiative. Yes. And so some of the other networking pieces that are going on. And it's companies like, you know, Cisco, Aristide, Juniper that'll probably see, you know, more dollars than red hat would. How do you guys balance that out? So that's a really great point. You know, I think, I've already said on a couple of occasions previously that, you know, I think hybrid clouds are going to be built and not bought. Even though we're, you know, bringing the technology to bear and making it consumable, the reality is there's a lot that customers are going to wrap around that core. So it's incumbent upon us to actually extend our ecosystem, both of technology providers, ISVs, and solution partners, cloud providers, you know, SIs, because in the end, we together are going to build, you know, these infrastructures and then evolve them for customers. So I think, you know, as a company, we're, we've always been, you know, a good partner, attempted to, and you know, we're putting that on steroids now. And we're actually investing quite aggressively to expand the infrastructure that we have to engage partners. So, you know, looking at OpenStack, you know, some of the comparisons are, you know, to what VMware did, you know, in the last decade. And one of the things that VMware did really well, you know, they said their partner system, partner ecosystem helped build that. For every dollar you spent on VMware, you're getting, you know, 15, 20 or more dollars back to the partners. Do you see that same opportunity with OpenStack? Oh, absolutely. So if you just look at the markets that Red Hat's playing in these days, it's something on a scale of $60 billion. We're not going to be a $60 billion company anytime soon. We'd like to be. But the reality is, we see it as our job to build a business that's enabling others to fully capitalize on that $60 billion market, particularly the cloud elements. Yeah, so I happened to chat with you last week and I want to bring up a question that I asked you then, which is, if you look at, you know, at the show, Cisco's here for the first time. You told most of us in networking five years ago that Cisco would be at a keynote at the Red Hat Summit. We would have fallen over and not believed it. You've got companies like Microsoft embracing open source, Cisco's here. Even Oracle, you know, has everything to do with MySQL and other things there. Are you guys welcoming everybody to the tables? Is it good to see everybody finally understanding that open source is where the future is going? What's your take on that? Yeah, so I think to the point about the $60 billion market, the sooner a vendor community recognizes that this is going to be the predominant innovation model, the faster we can go reach those customers. And as we talked last week as well, I think the other dynamic that may not be apparent yet, but that we see playing out very quickly is the mind shift that's happening among IT executives. You know, they look at the pace of innovation that's happening in these open source communities and ecosystems. They recognize that they're betting large portions of their next generation IT fabric on open source technologies, not just cloud, but big data, mobility. And they start to ask themselves, how could we get those kind of benefits at the application level? So I think you're going to see over time, customers start to think about how to use open source technologies and methods within their development organizations, another area of expertise that we have. I think it's all sort of turning into a perfect form of your customer adoption and a virtual cycle. So let me ask you a little bit of a loaded question. You know, when I look at the storage world, said storage administrators are rather inefficient. If you look at the networking world, many have criticized that they're a little bit behind doing too many manual efforts and haven't really automated. You know, what do you think is the state of the Linux administrator and the gap between what Linux is doing and the rest of infrastructure? Well, as Brian Stevens pointed out in his keynote this morning, you know, historically and sort of classic deployment models, the ratio of sys admins to servers measuring some form or another, you know, hasn't changed much material. And we see all those dimensions that I talked about before, the four tenants of our open hybrid cloud strategy as starting to change that. And I think, again, where so much of this innovation is happening around Linux and open source, this is going to be the catalyst for changing the efficiency model around system and file management. So I want to ask you about OpenStack, okay? So, let me take a step back. So, being an SVP of Red Hat, publicly held company, you can't really say a lot of things publicly about numbers and stuff, because you know, disclosure is all the lawyers who are watching you. But I want to give you a chance to address the audience and share something that might be itching you. Like, what, and the question is this, what is out there that you'd like to correct about Red Hat after misperception or just an awareness, someone might not know about Red Hat. Then you feel like, you know, I just wish I had a microphone and just to tell people, you know, we're not doing that, we're doing that. I want to give you a chance to share something on a personal level or with Red Hat that you'd like to get the word out of. Yeah, I think the first thing is, we haven't fully educated customers on the breadth of capabilities. We have infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, you know, you got to talk to Craig here in a minute. I think he probably echoed the same point. We have an incredibly robust set of capabilities, all leveraging the open source model and the pace of innovation in all of those threads has been accelerating. So I think that's one, you know, helping customers understand the breadth of capability we can bring to bear. Shipping product, shipping code. Absolutely, absolutely. And then, no vapor. Like real. That's exactly right. And production deployments, you know, of a scale that, you know, are thousands and thousands of cores in the case of OpenStack, which actually gets me to the second point and that is the notion that somehow OpenStack's not ready for production deployment. It's still early days, but when we take a branch, we make it bulletproof. And in fact, just one quick anecdote. One of the fellows that just joined my team is a fellow named Alessandro Perilli. He was previously the private cloud analyst at Gartner and he wrote a seminal blog back in November about the sort of the general lack of maturity in OpenStack as it comes from the community. But in point of fact, that's natural, right? The community is there to innovate. It's companies like Red Hat, whose job it is to turn it into the mission critical platform. The amazing thing about Alessandro is, you know, he wrote that blog. It was a really, I think I remember that blog. It was very well read. But, you know, he would tell you this himself. He thinks that one company that is already doing it and can do more of it is Red Hat. So, he's come here. He's leading our Open Hybrid Cloud program. So, first thing is, hey, we have more stuff than you think. Get the word out. Hey, don't listen to the FUD too. OpenStack is ready when we ship something. Even though that it's the bridge that's being built. You don't need to have the whole bridge to execute with it. So basically, to summarize your summary. I'm from Boston, right? So, we got a lot more. Bottom line, David. We got a lot more stuff than people know. And what we've got is wicked good. Okay. Wicked piss up, as they would say. So, from that area too, I can say that. Guvo myself and I have 14 years. Final point. Competition. I mean, what do you say to all the FUD out there? Like, hey, you know, I'm going to a cocktail party. You guys are really getting your ass handed to you by Cloud Foundry. Yeah, I'd love it. Yeah, I mean, certainly. Whether that's true or not. Well, I think there's always buzz in the industry. And I think what matters is what real customers are taking into production. And so, you know, we're, you know, I think there's little question in customers' minds that hybrid clouds are the likely deployment model. Ultimately, OpenStack is going to be the primary alternative for building out the private cloud portion of that. And then everything else is going to sort itself out. I mean, one thing that I admire about Red Hat for many years is its adaptability and its willingness to complement whatever customers have to deploy. Yeah, and we see other approaches. We see Amazon certainly cover their events, IBM's events, HP events, and you know, EMC and Pivotal of those guys and you guys and others. Everyone has a different approach, but one thing that the people who are successful, they understand that the OpenStores community game is about respecting the cathedrals that were built and not bombing them for personal gain. And yeah, when you see marketing tactics that come from the old school of, you know, blocking and tackling and, you know, giving someone an elbow and they're not looking, it comes back to biting. I mean, do you agree? I mean, that's kind of like, there's no arms out there. No question. And I think that's part of the learning that our industry's got to go through. The funny thing about Red Hat is we have almost the exact opposite challenge. We have so many developers that live in the upstream. They often forget that, you know, the business guys back at the ranch have to figure out how to make money at this too. But that's the right balance. You know, you want them out there innovating and then we'll figure out how to make, you know. It's a nice balance like the lava lamp. It flows back and forth on the equity and the love flows back and forth. Final question, I know we got a break is open stacks coming up, we'll have the cube there for multiple days, broadcasting live in Atlanta. What do you expect to see there in terms of, you know, just concepts, what's going to be the mannequin that's got the jacket, the scarf? What do you expect to see hanging on, hanging around the messaging and the concepts? I think you're going to see a couple things. I think you'll see lots of real customers talking about their experiences going into production. I think, I mean, I can tell you from our perspective we have a way of announcements of things that we're doing in that context. And I suspect you're going to see it. To me, it's likely that from Hong Kong in the fall to Atlanta in the spring, it's going to look like, you know, years of maturation, you know, relatively speaking. And final question around open shifts. Some people say there's been some flood around, oh, open shifts with no traction slowing down and, you know, other approaches. What do you say to that? Well, I think, so first of all, that's not the factual case and Craig can talk to that too. But I think we see, you know, a continuum of infrastructure as a service to platform as a service. And we want those to be a natural flow. So, you know, the gear deep work that they're doing on an open shift to enable the Docker containerized applications. It's all in that same continuum just up at the application layer. Jim, it's been a wicked good segment here on theCUBE. Really appreciate you coming on. This is theCUBE live at the Red Hat in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. Thanks, John. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jim.