 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Paul Cormier. He is the executive vice president and president of products and technologies here at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. I want to ask you about a point you made earlier in your keynote. You talked about the challenges that customers facing. You talked about how last year, the three big ones were costs, security, and automation. This year, it's all about cloud strategy and about the pace of innovation. What is driving this shift in customer priorities and challenges? I think the big thing is driving it. I think of the previous years, people were really test driving a lot of the cloud and the hybrid technologies. And now as they actually start to move to the next phase and they actually have to stitch it into their environment, that's where we get real. And that's actually why we see a lot of customers here because that's what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months is worked with our customers in getting this into their environment. Cloud as part of their IT environment and not the entire IT environment. So I think that's what's driving it. We're solving real world problems now and I think that's what we do best and I think that's what open source does best. Paul, I thought it was a great point. I'd love to see that the cloud strategy was like the number one thing because it is what I've been hearing when I've been talking to practitioners last year or two. I had a t-shirt that said blah, blah, cloud because we spent so many years talking about it in the industry, it's always, oh, there's this cool new thing and customer you need to get on it. Now, having a cloud strategy is critical for any IT department to understand how they're going forward, where they deploy resources, where they go to their partners, like yourself to be able to change and shift many of the things that they're doing. What we found, even in my own shop, even my own development shop, what we found is you had a lot of departmental groups going out to the public cloud and now you're getting, now because you're spending so much there and pieces going out, now the CIO gets involved and now they want to look at it, how is this going to fit into my overall strategy? And so at that point, the only way is hybrid. And so the CIO now, they don't want five islands of different operating environments, they want one. As a little operating group, really doesn't care, they want their own thing. But when the CIO is now looking at an overall structure for the entire company, that's what's really driving hybrid right now and that's what's really driving these implementations. And frankly, that's what's driving a lot of the desire to have this common operating environment that we've been talking about for a long time and implementing for a long time. So how do you do it? When you're talking about these five separate islands but those five islands now need to work together and communicate and collaborate and come up with a unified strategy. Well, how do you do it? Two things. First of all, because so much has moved to Linux, rel is that platform. The cloud is about the application. One of the points that I made in my keynote this morning kind of made it a little subtly so maybe it didn't come through. We're not building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure. We're building infrastructure for the applications. And so that's the really important part. The applications run on Linux. So the first step is really getting a common operating environment for the application. We did that 15 years ago with rel. So now, when you see rel on bare metal, rel is a virtual machine on us, VMware or Microsoft, rel as a container in a private cloud, rel in one of the public guys. It's the same rel. So we do 7.1 or 7.2. It's 7.1 or 7.2. We upgrade in the same way with the same number of bits. We have a security update for 7.2. It's the same thing. So now the application really with rel really gets that consistency. Then with OpenShift now we bring the infrastructure to maintain it, support it, deploy it and manage it. And so that's what's really, the light bulb's gone on for a lot of CIOs as they've seen OpenShift and OpenStack as well because we're making this hybrid world now manageable and secure. But rel's been the key because that's the application. That's the application layer. Frankly, that is the piece that VMware didn't have, right? VMware didn't have any pieces that touched the app. Apps don't run on hypervisors. They run on operating systems and even containers. It's just a Linux OS sliced up in a different way. So that's really been the key. We've been at this for 15 years. Really, if you look at it that way, we've evolved this over 15 years. All right. Paul, you mentioned briefly in your keynote an announcement with AWS. I know keynote tomorrow is going to go in more detail, but we think it's a pretty big deal. I've been talking to some of the press. We talked to one of your customers, Optum, who's one of the keynote speakers. I mean, he said GameChanger. This is, he uses OpenShift, loves what we can do this. You were just talking about the application affinity and that's what infrastructure is for. Can you connect that with what we're talking about with AWS here? Yeah, I mean, I think why this is a GameChanger for all of us and mostly the customer is because prior to this, invoking an Amazon service for an application would mean that that could only be invoked from that infrastructure at AWS can only be run there, frankly. And it really was limiting. With now bringing the connection points back into OpenShift, the application can now invoke that Amazon service from on Amazon or even on-premise. And it really extends the reach of Amazon to come in to really now build a hybrid environment. And I also think it's significant for our customers telling both of us, both Red Hat and Amazon, that they want to run in a hybrid world. So that's the GameChanger. It really extends both of our reaches to that way while keeping that consistent operating environment with the rail base. Yeah, and that's different than just saying, oh, I can run a VM in an Amazon environment. Because you're running a VM as an island. Now you're running an actual system that's spanning across the hybrid world being managed and orchestrated from one place. I want to talk to you about your approach to the product design and development process. In the past you've talked about the virtues of patience and how you do not build a multi-million dollar product overnight, it takes years. And yet, on the other hand, there is this desire and hunger for fast innovation and changes. How do you strike that balance with your team and also with customers? My wife wouldn't say I had that much patience. But at least you appreciate that it's a good thing. I mean, frankly, our company and even all the way to our board of directors has been very, very supportive of that. The first thing we do is we start in these upstream communities. And really what we're doing now is we're really integrating multiple communities together. When it was just the OS in the past, people used to say all the time there is no Linux community, there's multiple communities and our job is to bring it all together. Right now it's that on steroids. You know, we try to pick the right technologies and drive it. I mean, I'll give you a great example. When we bought a company a few years back, KumerNet, you know, at the time Zen was the hypervisor, the community was going to KVM, we bought the company, they had zero revenue. We had zero additional revenue because it was a hypervisor. We bought it so we could get behind the community, bolster it and know it would go in the right direction. That is the key that no one else has really figured out is to place yourself in these communities over the years and drive it, drive it, drive it and then bring that innovation into a product. I call it the difference between a project and a product. Our products are really an amalgamation of many communities put together in a platform to solve a real world problem. But you have to have the patience. REL has been such a successful product for us. Frankly, it's fueled financially. It's fueled in us and given us the ability to have the patience for all these next generation platforms. So that's what's done it for us really. Yeah, your CEO, Jim Whitehurst, in his book talked about how from an acquisition standpoint, everything you do, it's got to be open sourced. Does that hamper you at all? Are there certain technology areas? Things are moving so fast that, you know, would you buy something and keep it internal for a while until it was open sourced? Or how do you handle something like that? The last five or six acquisitions were not open sourced and we open sourced them. So I mean, it's just in our DNA. Frankly, I think it's forced us to do it the right way because we couldn't have a closed source product now if we tried. Jim and I, if Jim and I said we're going to have a closed source product we'd be in the office alone. And it's in the DNA and it's really forced us to build better software because we never ever think, well, here's the line and everything above is open and or below is open and above is closed. We never have to think that it's all open. And it just forces that innovation. The landscape is littered with companies that have tried to have that line. It just doesn't work. You confuse your engineers, you confuse your market, you confuse your customers, you confuse your partners. It's all open. And that's what really drives the innovation. Let's talk about recruitment and getting this war for talent that we're seeing in the tech industry. Red Hat's based in North Carolina. You're based here in Boston. Of course, we have people here from 70 different countries as your CEO mentioned in his opening remarks. What are you seeing? What are the trends? What do the best and brightest developers want out of an employer? And how are you giving it to them? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things. Up here in Boston, the products group is headquartered up here. Sales group is headquartered up here. So we sort of live together. One of the things we've just did, we just announced we're opening an office right across the street here for both R&D and our customer briefing center. So one thing is... Yeah, congratulations. We're excited for that. Of course, you've got the Westford facility with lots of engineers, but Boston, a block away from where GE's new headquarters is going to be. A block away. I mean, it's about collaborating with the universities, collaborating with the students that come out of the universities. I see it around the world. No, but they want to be in the city. They want to be in the city. That's the first thing. We have a thousand engineers in the Czech Republic that are core to our product. I mean, they build many of the products in the Czech Republic. We're near universities. So we're attending... The reason why we did Boston for the R&D is universities just as the Czech Republic. Because now what's taught in engineering and computer science programs is Linux and open source. So when students can get out, go work for a company, we give them the freedom to really drive where the technology needs to go, that's really our recruiting draw. I would never go into our engineers and say, you will implement this this way. They implement it the right way. So autonomy... Autonomy and cities. Well, autonomy and cities in the right places. I mean, we're really looking for the talent that really wants to innovate. And they're coming out of the universities now doing that. So that's what's been successful for us. All right, Paul, we were talking about, this is the 13th year of the show. It's the fourth year we've done it. You guys, the cloud piece is really matured a lot. If you look forward, we come back a year from now. What do you kind of see as some of the major things that we'll want to have accomplished? What's on your plate for the next 12 months? One of the things that we're looking at now, I sort of ended up in my keynote, is we really think that, we've really abstracted the differences for the application layer, storage layer, application layer, management layer across the hybrid world. But there's a lot of pieces of the infrastructure to the operations people have to deal with every day. The network stacks, the really underneath in the plumbing, storage stacks, sort of the difference between OpenShift and OpenStack. We write VMs being orchestrated beside containers. So we really start starting to see that those pieces come together, really that application layer and that infrastructure layer coming together. You think, we think of OpenStack as bringing the infrastructure to the hybrid world and OpenShift as bringing the application to the hybrid world, starting to bring those pieces together. And I think that's what you'll see more of next year is, you know, commonality around management, orchestration, networking, storage, just more of that and more ease of plug and play. Great, well, Paul Cormier, thank you so much for joining us. This is Rebecca Knight along with Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining us at Red Hat Summit 2017. We'll be back just after this.