 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia for Red Hat's AnsibleFest, AnsibleFest hashtag. Check out all the commentary on Twitter. Of course, we're here for two days. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP, Cloud Management, International Data Corp IDC. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. So, IT operations has been an evolving thing. AI and automation, really changing the landscape of this data equation. IT operations used to be, hey, you've got IT ops, no problem. Now, with the world changing to be more software-driven, software-led, a lot's changed. What's your take? What's your research say about the IT ops landscape? Well, I mean, you have to put it in the context of what's going on generally with IT, right? I mean, we're clearly seeing dev ops, you know, is either in production or in large-scale testing and the majority of enterprises. We've got lots and lots of containers in Kubernetes usage. We've got multiple clouds and just about every enterprise you talk to. It's, you know, well over 90%. And what that all means is that there's just a lot of change on a lot of different levels. And so that's kind of really put stress on traditional operational approaches, on task-oriented automation, on, you know, siloed approaches to control and monitoring. And what we're really starting to see is now a move to having to become more integrated, more unified and more collaborative across all these teams. And that's actually kind of driving demand for a new generation of monitoring, automation and analytics kind of all put together. It's interesting how management software always been, it's always been part of every IT conversation we've had over the past decades. And, but recently, if you look at the evolution of cloud and hybrid multicloud, you mentioned that. Cloud 1.0, Amazon, Public Cloud, pretty straightforward to comprehend. Start up, start there. But this whole other cloud paradigm is shifting, has taken these categories like network management, turned them into observability. Five companies go public and M&A activities booming. Automation's similar kind of vibe to it here. It's got this management piece to it that used to be this white space. Now the aperture seems to be increasing. What's your take on this? Because we're trying to make sense of it. Customers are trying to figure it out. Obviously they've already been doing configuration management, but now they've got scale, they've got some of the things you mentioned. What's this automation category look like? Or is it a category? I don't know if it's a category or not, but certainly a thing, right? I think what we're seeing with automation is historically it was very individual driven. It was, I have a problem, right? I have to configure something or deploy something and I could whip up a script, do a little code and it worked for me and it wasn't documented and that was great. And I think what we're happening now with just the way applications are being architected, I mean you're moving to very modular micro services based approach to applications, the way they're deployed, all the dependencies across all the different tiers from network to storage to public cloud to private cloud. It's really very, very difficult to rely on a bunch of ad hoc tools to do that. And so I think what's happened with automation is it's expanding up to become as much a business collaboration platform as it is just sort of a task, feeds and speeds sort of control platform. And we're kind of in the middle of that evolution. Even two years ago, I don't think you saw the kinds of analytics and machine learning and AI that we're now starting to see coming as an overlay to the automation environment. Yeah, Mary, one of the things we've been talking about for the last couple of years is that great buzzword of digital transformation. The real driver for that is I need to be a data-driven organization, not just ad hoc things. So where does automation fit into that broader discussion of changing operational models like you were talking about? Well, I think done right. It can really be a platform for collaboration and accelerating digital transformation across the enterprise because rather than having each team have to do their own thing and then do a manual handoff or a big change control meeting, so these things just don't scale and move quick enough in today's environments, particularly if you're trying to update your applications every five minutes, right? So I think the collaboration of the different teams and also a creative environment where you can have more generalists too, right? That there's collaboration across IT ops and DevOps and sort of the lines start to blur. You mentioned the word platform and we were talking to the Ansible team. They were very specific as to how they chose that for customers out there. Choosing a platform is a bit of a commitment. It's not just a tactical we're going to do this. What's your thoughts on the Ansible automation platform and what feedback do you have to customers as to how they're deciding which platforms and how many platforms that they'll develop on? Yeah, it's a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think one of the things that the Ansible team is really focusing on that's important is the modularity, the fact that you can plug and play and kind of grow over time and also that it's a very software driven paradigm with the automation artifacts under source control, which is kind of different for a lot of ops teams. They don't have that notion of Git and software development all the time. So I think that having a platform approach that still allows a fair amount of modularity integration and it lets different parts of the organization decide over time how much they want to participate in a very curated, consistent integration. And at the same time, at least in the Ansible world because of the way it's architected, they can still have modules that call out to other automation solutions that are in the environment. So it's not an all or nothing and I think that's really, really important. And also it's a platform for analytics. I'm sorry, but data about what's going on with the automation. The data is critical, but we had mentioned earlier on our previous interview with Red Hat folks and soon as intro about the cloud and how the complexity that's being introduced and you mentioned some of those earlier, the complexities are there. Of the automation solutions that you've seen, which ones have been the most impact for customers? Well, that's what you mean by impact. There's such a range of them. If you look in certainly the configuration, infrastructures, code space, obviously Ansible, there's a couple others. If you look into the CI-CD space, right? I mean, there's a whole set of very optimized CI-CD tools out there that are very important to the DevOps environment. And again, you'll see integrations between the infrastructure and the CI-CD and they're all kind of blurring. And then you've got very specific, almost domain controllers, whether they're for hardware or converged infrastructure type platforms or whether they're for public clouds. And those don't go away, right? You still need something that understands the lower level system. And so I think what we're seeing is organizations trying to reduce the number of individual siloed automation tools they've got, but they're still probably going to have more than one to do the full stack with something, acting as kind of a policy-driven control plane and analytics-driven control plane in the middle. So you still got to run the plumbing. Right, exactly, exactly. You got to still run the system. It's a system now. Something like 70, 80% of the customers we talk to that are using one or more of the big public clouds, they're also using a fair amount of control tooling that's provided by those cloud vendors. And those aren't going to go away because it's just like a hardware system. You got to have the drivers, right? You got to have the core, but then you've got to be able to, again, have the process flow across it that's really important. What's your take on the marketplace shaking out the winners and losers? Because I know you like to track the marketplace from a research standpoint. It just seems that all the events we go to with theCUBE, everyone's jockeying for the control plane or something. The control plane of the data. Or the control plane for the management. So the control plane, I mean, meaning horizontally scalable, much more platform-centric. You start to see kind of a systems thinking coming back into the enterprise versus the siloed IT. But this illustrious control plane. What I mean, how many control planes can there be? What's your take on all this craziness? That's a good question. I mean, again, I think there is a difference between sort of the driver level, right? Which it used to be, again, those scripts. They were kind of like drivers, right? That's almost becoming just the playing field. You've got to have those integrations. You've got to have a nice modular way to architect that. What really is going to be the control plane is the data. It's the metrics around what are you doing. It's the performance, it's the security. And being able to actually optimize a lot of the SLOs that go along with that. That's really where the, being able to do a good thing with the data and tie it to the business and the app is where the real control is going to be. Mary, how is Ansible doing as a business? We saw a lot of proof points in the keynote about the community growth. Obviously, adoption is up, but anything you can share about how they've been doing really about four years into the Red Hat acquisition. Well, I mean, they're growing pretty effectively. They, I think that this whole category is growing and so they're benefiting quite a lot from that. I think we're seeing really strong growth in the partner communities, particularly here at this show. We're seeing some really larger and larger scale partnerships, more and more investment. And I think that's really important because ultimately for a technology like this to scale, it's got to become embedded in all kinds of solutions. So I look at much as the partner adoption as a good sign is anything. Well, it's, you know, I guess two, two things. One is the whole market's growing is Ansible doing better or worse than that. And, you know, what is the impact of those cloud native tooling that you mentioned is, you know, I look, there's kind of Red Hat, the Ansible traditional competition, which was more in the infrastructure management space. And now, yes, they do containerization and work more in the cloud environment. They're kind of spanning between those environments. Well, I think, you know, again, I see most organizations still using multiple tools. I think, you know, from a revenue and growth rate, I can't really get into it because, as you know, Ansible is actually part of Red Hat and Red Hat doesn't report out numbers at that level. But we certainly see a lot of adoption and we see Ansible, you know, at least, if not the primary, as one of the major tools in more and more organizations. And that's across compute storage network, very, very popular in the network space and then growing, you know, probably not quite as strong but growing interest in like security and IoT. It's interesting you mentioned the numbers and how Ansible is now part of Red Hat. When they bought Red, when Red Hat bought Ansible a couple of years ago, I think the year before Stu and I were talking about how configuration management was going to, automation was going to come. We kind of saw it, but one of the things that in the community and Red Hat have publicly talked about is, Red Hat didn't screw it up. They kind of like got it right. They kept them alive. They grew organically and this organic growth is kind of a forcing function for these new things. Are you happy with what Red Hat has done here with Ansible and this platform? What's your take on this platform? Because platforms have to enable good things and value. I think you're right. Ansible grew very virally and organically for a long time, but you kind of hit a wall with that at some point. I think that they rightly recognize that they needed to have the kind of tooling, the kind of metrics, the kind of hub and modularity that would allow it to go the next level. So I'm actually really encouraged by this announcement and I think it also position, again it positions it, I think to again to make partners driven solutions much more easily standardized. It opens up probably more ways for people to contribute to the communities. So I think it's really positive. And as a platform, if it's enabling value, what kind of value propositions do you see emerging? Because it got the content collections, the automation hub, automation analytics. Is it just bolting onto rel as value? What is some of the value that you might see coming out of the Ansible automation platform? Well, I mean Ansible's always been very agnostic, right? And it's always been its own business, which certainly can complement rel, there's rel roles and all kinds of stuff. But that's not really the focal point for Ansible. Ansible really is about providing that modular consistent automation approach that can span all these different operational domains and really reach into the business process. So I think it's great for the Red Hat portfolio, but now as we start to see them building bridges into the bigger IBM portfolio, we haven't had a lot of IBM slash Ansible announcements yet, but I would expect that we're going to see more over time. I think the OpenShift operator integrations are going to be important as part of the things that IBM is doing with OpenShift. So I think there's more to come. Mary, I'm wondering what your research finds regarding open source consumption in general. How many of the customers out there are just using the free community addition? Red Hat's very clear. The open source is not Red Hat's business model. It is the way that they work. It's their development model. So any general comments about open source and specifically around Ansible, kind of the community free addition versus. Well, it's obviously been an interesting week in open source world with the, not Red Hat, but some other vendors getting a little bit of flack for some of the choices they've made about their business practices. I think there are many, many organizations that continue to get started with unpaid, unsupported open source. What typically happens is if it gets to a critical mass within a company, at some point they're going to say either, I have to invest a lot of people in time and do all the testing, hardening, integration, tracking and security updates. And they're still never going to get notified directly from Intel when there's a problem, right? So I think many organizations, as they decide this is mission critical, then they start to look for supported additions. And we've done a lot of research looking at the benefits of getting that level support. And typically it's just 50, 60% improvements and stability, security, time to market because you're not having to do all that work. So it's a trade-off, but you'll always have some particularly small organizations, individual teams that they're not going to pay for it. But I think it's scale is when it really becomes valuable. Mary, final question for you, for the folks watching that couldn't make the event or industry insiders that aren't in this area, why is this Ansible Fest more important this year than ever before? What's the big story? What's the top thing happening now in this world? I mean, there's great energy here this year and I've gone to a couple of these over the years. First of all, it's the biggest one they've ever had. I think really though, it's the story of collaboration, building teams, automating end-to-end processes. And that's really powerful because it's very clear that the community has stepped up from just saying, I can do a great job with network automation or I can do a great job with cloud or with server. And they're really saying, this is about transforming the organization, making the organization more productive, making the business more agile. And I think that's a big step for us as well. You know, I think that's a huge point. I think that's something that's really important because we've talked about capabilities before. It does this, does that to your point. This is kind of a testament to the operationalizing of DevOps because people have always been the bottleneck. So this seems to be the trend. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I think so. And I also see, again, this community talking so much about upskilling the people, embracing things like unit testing and source control. And it's a maturation of the whole automation conversation among this community. And remember, this community is only, what, six, seven years old? Yeah, 2012. Yeah, I mean, it's really a very, very young community. So I think it's a really important pivot point just in terms of the scale of the problems they can address. Software abstraction, solving, big problem. Automation will be a great category. Mary, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, sharing your insights and your research and your analysis. I appreciate it. Okay, thank you. Mary Johnston Turner, Research VP of Cloud Management at IDC here inside theCUBE, breaking down the analysis of Red Hat's Ansible position vis-a-vis the market trends. It's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.