 Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin back with you and John Furrier. This is day one of theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2022. John, we've been having great conversations all morning about automation and how it's really pivotal and central. One of the things that we want to talk about next is automation as a strategy. You know, some of the barriers to customer adoption. One of them is, well, can we really understand where the most ROI is going to be? But another one is automation happening kind of in pockets and silos. And we're going to be talking next with one of our alumni about working those down. This is going to be a great segment from the customer perspective, the conversations they're having, problems trying to solve, and really got a great CUBE alumni back to share. And we're excited. It's going to be a good segment. We do have a great alumni. Walter Bentley, fresh from the keynote stage, is back with us, the senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat. Walter, it's great to have you back on the program. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I really look forward to doing this every year. And you know, it's exciting. So we had your great energetic keynote this morning and you were really talking about organizations need to think about automation from a strategic lens perspective, a really, a true long-term investment. Where are most organizations today and how are you going to help them get there? Right, so most organizations today are kind of in that sweet spot where they've discovered that they can do the tactical automation and they can deal with those small day-to-day things. And now they want to move into the space where they're really able to plug automation into their current workflows and try to optimize it. And that's the perfect direction to be heading. And what I always encourage our customers is that once you get to that point, don't stop. You got to keep going because the next phase is when you begin to innovate with automation. And when automation is at the beginning of everything you're creating. And at that point, that's when you're really going to see the great benefits from it. How have your customer conversations evolved over the last couple of years, particularly as the world has changed, but we've also seen the acceleration of automation and so much advancement in the technology. Right, you'll be shocked that our customers wanted us to speak to them in more of an enterprise architecture level. They wanted us to really be able to come in and help them design how they're going to lay out their automation vision. And that surprised me at first. My background being in architecture for many years, I didn't know that automation had evolved to that level. And that was one of the things that we tried to do our best to rise to the occasion and be able to answer that call. You know, Walter, one of the things when we were in person last in 2019, you were on theCUBE and we did the remote, we were kind of right. You got it right when we were talking about this. Hey, if this goes the way we think it's going to go, the automation layer is going to be horizontally scale with the cloud. So income's cloud growth, lift and shift. Now I got some refactored applications in the cloud and I got on premises edge coming, hybrid steady state. What does automation look like? You had said it's going to scale. And so as clients realize, well, this was kind of a group within the group doing some automation stuff with Ansible, all great stuff, product leadership, great community, check, check, check. Now, how do you make that a global architecture for a company? What's the take to make that an enterprise scale architecture? What's the next step for the journey and for the community and the customers? So one of the major announcements today is actually one of the right steps in the right direction, which is now that you can deploy AAP on all of your hyperscalers, right? So you have a local, you're covering your private cloud area, now you're able to cover your hyperscalers. Now it's time to unite them together so that they can all kind of work as one function. And to me, that is the enterprise approach to AAP. And I'm just so excited that we finally have rolled it out for AWS, we have it for Azure, of course we have it inside. And we're also working on things, like you said, like the edge, but also things like making sure we're covering customers that are air gapped, customers that do not have the capability of the ingress of being able to go in and out of that environment and that network, right? We're working on strategic solutions to be able to do that better for them as well. It's interesting, we've been talking about super cloud on theCUBE, I've been calling that term at re-invent about people using cloud in a different way to kind of do things, and it's become kind of also a term for multi-cloud. Yes. So if you think about what you just said, it's interesting, this cloud services that could, that they all have stores, they have compute, there might be a day where they're all kind of invisible. Yes. And you can have spanning services across the cloud, but yet they can still differentiate on their own. So it's not so much about standards, it's more about that interoperability. How do you see that? What's your reaction to that? Well, that's one of the core reasons why we moved to the name of the Ansible Automation Platform, Platform being the key, right? Is the platform is supposed to be able to span into different environments and really kind of unite them together. And that was one of the things that I really liked about when we went to that late last year, yeah, late last year, and we've been working with our customers to make sure that we make that front and center that they move towards that environment so that they can begin to do better scale and really operate at that executive level. What's your favorite customer story that you think really articulates the value of what you just said? Right. So the one, so I'll give you a different one from the one that I talked about on stage. And again, when we went in from a services engagement, we did not expect the outcome of the fact that they would access this particular customer. We went in something very tactical, just laying down the platform for them. And the expectation was we would lay it down and walk away and hopefully they would pick it up and kind of run with it. What we came to realize is that they liked the oversight and they liked the way that we were working with them and they wanted to take those preferred approaches and really embed them, right, in their organization. And so they invited us back, actually for two or three different consulting engagements to come back and just help them drive that adoption. And this is, they're at the very beginning, right? So they're doing it a little bit different in a lot of other organizations. The other organizations would lay down the platform, do some things and then call us back to help them with adoption, right? The report card out? Yeah, absolutely. They did it differently. And that to me stood out as the level of maturity that our IT organization is. It sounds like they went from tactical to strategic pretty quickly, which is not normally the case. No, not at all. Not normally the case, but as you can clearly see that we're starting to see that more and more with our customers. They're up-leveling, I hate for the theme, but they're up-leveling, right? And that's what I meant by my organization, my team that I run, we have to do more with our customers because they are expecting more. For them to level up, and I loved how that was used this morning. I'm like, yeah, that's a cool term, level up. We all got to level up with some degree. How are you helping organizations do that from a cultural shift perspective? Because of course the people are so integral to this being successful. Can't forget that. Absolutely. So you know, remember the days of when you would have the DevOps team and that was like the thing, like you have to form your DevOps team and once you got that, you're good to go. And I always tell our customers that's a good start, but that's definitely not where you want to end. And you have to get to the point where you have all parts of your organization writing automation content, feeling comfortable, being able to kind of control their day to day. And so that's where you have to break down those silos. You have to really have those, you know, your operators and your developers and your DBAs and your networking folks really communicating. And if everyone kind of takes care of their own world and write content to control what they do on their day to day, they can bring those together. Walter on buzzword, it's been kicking around, Silicon Valley and the tech industry recently is multiplayer versus single player software. Yes. I carry them, must be gamers, obviously. Yes. This course, Pop, I heard that on stage here in the nature's announcement earlier. You know, when you talk about teamwork, ops, devs, while working together, clearly the operator role is changing. What that means is changing. Devs are getting stronger and more open source. They're shifting left and all that good stuff in the CID pipeline. As the teams work together, multiplayer in an organization, what's the success form of that you see emerging for how to organize, how to motivate, how to get people kind of in a good teamwork, past shoot score, kind of team oriented approach? What I'm really proud to talk about is how AAP has really enabled that and kind of fast tracks that ability for everyone to work together. Within AAP, all the functionality that's now built into it, there's pieces of it that are focused on different operators or different parts of the IT organization and were made to be able to help to bring them all together. I love the components such as the service catalog. Imagine being able to have a place where you can publish all of your content for other people to consume. Back in the day, everything was stored in a repository and you had to know what you were looking for. Just small changes like that, having the Ansible 2E, right? So you having tools that are actually built in for those who are writing the content to be able to have their fingertips, the ability to test their content right from inside of the 2E, right? So the terminal interface. Just those small little nuances to me is what helps to bring it all together and kind of create that clue. Great leverage, not a lot of busy work and hunting and packing for stuff and configuring manually. Absolutely. Awesome. For you guys. Well, you know, we have some big announcements coming up tomorrow. I won't get into it as much as I want to talk about it. Ed Shea, events. Yeah, yeah, something starts with the E. But also some really fantastic technology. What we're doing is we're really taking the idea of automation and really feeding into it in a sense that we're building into some really smart technology into AAP. And I'm excited for the direction it's going and I know everyone tomorrow is going to really hear some great things. We heard up leveling, we heard up leveling. Cultural shift, if I asked you, what does culture shift mean? How would you answer that? I would answer that in a sense that the culture shift is shifting from the place where you feel that you're on an island and you have to solve for it alone, as well as feeling that you have to solve for the whole ribbon of whatever you're working on. And that culture shift is moving from that mentality to the fact that you have a whole team of folks who may know how to solve for that already and you feel comfortable being able to reach out to them and work with them to be able to build that. And that, to me, is the change. I'm an old school infrastructure dude. I was the one who would wake up two o'clock in the morning to fix a problem. I thought it was on me. But now the cultural shift is now we're a team and we're going to work together to solve it. So that's kind of my view on it. And the appetite in organizations is there, because oftentimes in the siloed world, I own this, this is my baby, how do you help them as a trusted advisor to really open up the kimono and embrace that collaboration because ultimately it's the right strategic direction for the business? The first step in that is making sure that everyone is kind of operating from the same book or the same plan. And until you actually write that plan down and publish it in a place for other people to consume, it creates a little bit of a barrier. So that's the first thing we do is write down that plan, make it available for all the consume. And at the beginning, not everyone runs to it, but over time, if their curiosity begins to peak and then over time, they begin to consume it and possibly contribute to it themselves over time. That's how we kind of conquer that. And so far we've seen some good success. What would you say if someone said, I want some proof, proof in the pudding, proven methods to help accelerate the time to value with automation and help organizations to really understand and quantify the ROI for doing so? And to me, this is a conversation I love having because we've come out with something that we call success metrics. And yes, they are exactly what they sound like. There's some metrics that you can use to measure in your organization to kind of determine your maturity around automation. The two key things that I would love to share about that is that when we think of metrics, we think of performance, we think of how well something is running, how long it's been running. Those are all great, but the two additional success metrics that we include in there are around more of the cultural field, the perception, right? The perception as well as how comfortable your employees feel using that product. And that's where the shift of looking at the cultural, not just the technical side, but the cultural side of things, has made a big difference. So I love sharing those metrics with our customers. It usually resonates, and then we help them dig in on to see how they fit and also give them some ideas as to how they can improve going forward. I'm sure they appreciate that, knowing where we are now, how do we get to the, not the end state obviously, it's a journey, but how do we get farther along in this from a unified front approach rather than operating in these silos, which is not going to get us to the journey that we should be on. Yeah. So some good stuff coming out tomorrow, not going to give us any nuggets. We totally understand. No, no, you're going to be very excited. Yes, it's good stuff. Awesome. I got to ask you one quick question before we wrap up. You mentioned multi-cloud earlier. This is a big conversation in the industry. A lot of people are debating what that is. It sounds good on paper. Where's the customer's view as they look at this journey, because we see a future where there'll be services that won't be common across clouds because of differentiation, and some that will be, and that just be shared, like compute for instance, and let us be there where you can call in to the multi-cloud. How do your customers think about multi-cloud? Are they having that conversation more they ago? Is that more of a destination than the future in their mind? It feels more like a destination of the future. Right now, a lot of organizations have kind of solidified on one cloud per se that they want to be able to roll out as far as being able to scale up and down their resources. But the idea is eventually, you're going to go with whatever works best for that product or whatever works best for that business case that you're trying to solve for. And that's why I love the fact that AAP is kind of generically being able to be applied across all of them so that that is going to be your unifier, right? That's going to be the layer that will stay the same no matter where you go. And that's one of the things that I love about our product around that is that we are meant to be the unifier and we're trying our best to hold to that. It's a great opportunity for Ansible. That's there, all right. To be the unifier, last question for you before we wrap. What was some of the feedback about from your session this morning on Ansible really being that unifier? Any folks come up to you and say anything that was particularly insightful? Well, you know what? What was kind of alluded to or shared with me directly was the fact that thinking about automation as you would traditional platforms, right? And building a strategy and the idea that you need to write that down and actually make some decisions around that. And it wasn't that it wasn't thought about it. It just never came front to mind. And so I'm happy that I was able to plant that seed because that's what we're seeing that makes the difference between those who are very successful with automation and those who may not be. Writing it down. Sometimes it's fact to basics that really help fuel the growth of organizations. Walter, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today talking about what's going on automation as a strategy, the vision and how Ansible is really on its way to becoming that unifier. We appreciate your insights. No, it's my pleasure. And thank you for having me again. Our pleasure for Walter Bentley and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022 continues next.