 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting, Dave Knight, who manages the Red Hat relationship. Lee, he's the lead there. And Mike Wujwa, who's the public sector managing director, both from Deloitte Consulting, LLP official name. Guys, great to come on. We were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Like I said, we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that because there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines, bringing solutions. But before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself, share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. Yeah, so again, thanks for having us, John. I'm Dave Knight. I'm a solution architect and global Red Hat Alliance manager for Deloitte. We've got responsibility for making sure that we play nicely in the sandbox together where we've got joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. Hi everyone, thanks for having us, John. I'm a managing director, Mike Bouchois out of Boston, Texas. I am coming up on year 20 in public sector consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers. Good to be here. Yeah, great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because, you know, Mike, you are living in probably one of the hottest markets, public sector. I've been following that for many, many years. Generations actually from the early computer industry. You know, GSA contracts, all these contracts, you've got all the public sector. They move very slowly, but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption. You can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now? Give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. You bet, John. So we talked a little bit before we started this, but, you know, in my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really close to this other than maybe Y2K. And as Dave mentioned, the Affordable Care Act legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic Department of Labor and Health and Human Service agencies, for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid time frames that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming into field offices were now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor. The pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country. Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by 1,000% in some cases. The amount of increased volume required agencies across the country, higher temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed and benefits rapidly provided to citizens of need. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application that are really unfamiliar with, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how do people use an external web application. The benefits, more citizen were served in much less time. Claims were filed officially by trained workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so the second example is with Department of Human Services. So one state as mentioned, citizens were used to going into field offices, but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So one state provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. This application was stood up in two weeks. Families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. To date over 50,000 cases have been certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you, John. So I mean, Ashley, there's some great use cases you got. Basically I got to work at home, new architecture there. You got to have a new workflows. I mean, this pause is some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave, take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat because obviously now it's new deployment, new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? Yeah, so great question. And it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike just illustrated. Joe, how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. I mean, the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices, now it's all done remotely because you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged in our solutions include Ansible for Automation, some of the middle-world products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift platform that allows us to greatly accelerate the development delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hat's innovative technologies. What would you say if someone said, what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs? So again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey, but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets, all the sort of factors that drive those things. And Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source. They made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing and that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source, again, to the degree that our customers like to leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the public sector space, as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. Mike, I want to come back to you on this open component, open question, open source, open technology, open innovation out in the open, as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software address the needs for your customers, for security and on-premise considerations? I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general, you know, so the open source principles of transparency, meritocracy, community, problem solving and collaboration, these are key components of both software innovation, as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud on new deals hosted in the cloud, on existing large systems, let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platform such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, SC Linux was around for years and we've always used SC Linux on our Java based workloads. Now we can have the conversation about saying, hey, well, you know that SC Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool container management platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling. In my health and human services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, ready to manually add those to a VMware cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes auto scale and then get rid of those instances when workload demands have been resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes, but in the end it helps the client and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you know, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on. And so it's hard in public sector, you might not have that speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the public sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together. They've got some wins under your belt on the round cloud and cloud and technology, obviously with the pandemic is needs there. Are you seeing, are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around public sector as it goes this next level? A lot of modernization happening, we're seeing that, but are there any challenges that you're seeing? Can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. So I can jump in here with this one, then Mike, I think you probably have some, maybe public sector specific examples, but, you know, one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, sysadmins, those types of resources. As Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about. It's the facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills, which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most IT organizations. So something like an open shift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints because there are skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage open shift, you can manage open shift on-prem, you can manage it on the, you know, recently released AWS version of that, Rosa, on the Azure version of that. So no matter where you're running it, you've got a common set of skills. That's the sort of a force multiplier. Same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts with an Ansible, you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. Again, sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. So you got operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, you know, public sector and other commercial areas, they kind of got to get used to the fact that, you know, you get some leverage here. You get some operating leverage, technically. More with less. More with less has always been a thing in IT and it's not, it's not relenting, that's for sure. It's been more, the more with less has always been kind of a tagline for, you know, budget cuts, right? Squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less in the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage, you know what I'm saying? So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. You know, the other thing I would say is something like an OpenShift platform allows, to Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article on wire.com about this where, you know, developers are salad with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And am I doing all these things that aren't related to development? If you have a good DevOps platform in place, the security folks can build guardrails into the platform and the developers can just go develop, which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah, program. And that's another, yeah, exactly. That's another riff on the more with less again in a resource, in a human resource way as versus the budget way. Yeah, and that really where OpenShift ties in. Mike, what's your take on this? Because with this kind of programmability infrastructure as code, DevSecOps, kind of modern developers, public sector loves that because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So, you know, change the infrastructure once and then, you know, a lot of many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now, but I'll say that more or less to me where I'm having conversations is, imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower cost, right? I mean, so CIOs light up when I explain to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So, you know, moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just, you know, packaging up a binary and dropping in on a, name your cloud provider, right? There's an entire blueprinting strategy. There's a cloud data of architecture, modernization discussion. So, we do those sort of things at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I would say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The collaborative partnership and relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So, we have low level strategic discussions. We validate our assumptions and optimize the use of the Red Hat technology. What we're doing in public sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, you know, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs in public sector, we're seeing out to the account teams across the country. Look, this is a slower layer dev SecOps platform. And by the way, you can run any.net or Java-based workload on it. So, we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform, that try and true production application. So, I'll give a quick example, John, if now's a convenient time regarding one of the things that we've done for a particular state client. Definitely, yeah, give the use cases, we love those. Yeah, so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the state of Washington. Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act earlier. There are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing in the primary driver behind the Affordable Care Act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using subsidized health insurance plans. So, in Washington, the health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange. The state of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise posting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of the solution with innovative products. So, the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-skilling performance and lower cost of ownership. So, we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API management and integration platforms. After reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept, the agency decided to move forward with Red Hat's three-skill API management platform, Red Hat Fuse for integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-skilling continuous integration tools and auto-the-box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift. You install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So, three outcomes I'll mention. Go ahead, John. No, no, continue. I thought you were finished. So, on the outcome side, the first outcome, the agency substantially lowered the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So, the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's ready to be extended. The number two outcome, cloud migration. Deloitte worked collaboratively with the agency's infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the help and fit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing, a bit obvious, but that successful release. Working collaboratively with our client, we were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the product's decision. The cutover to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues. So, we're exceptionally proud of that. Great stuff, great use cases. Again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike and chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, innovation is about scale. When you hear words like in a box or hybrid cloud, you hear about an operating environment. So, it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation. This is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about hybrid cloud and soon to be multiple cloud? Because you guys, like you said, have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat, you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear, they want back to the multi-vendor, open connection distributed environment. That's what they want. So, how does your relationship evolve given all this is happening? How do you see the future? Please chime in. Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming, catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. That is that hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons. The easy workloads for the most part that have either been moved or are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions. The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation. Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates, but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized. And let's get them back on-premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud. Deloitte as a firm, we're skilling up, we're tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers. Again, we're starting to ask us these really challenging questions about hybrid cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. Yeah, and just a key point there is that you think about it like the way you're discussing it. It's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform, then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed. And then what data you're getting from it? You know, whether you bring it to a factory, for instance, you say, hey, okay, we're going to put it on-prem because it's a factory or whatever. So you need more data. What was the change over? This is like a day two operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? Well, I mean, I've actually been going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally was moved to a platform, not a provider, because you get that flexibility. Now, the reality is stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of, you know, set of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. Mike, set up for you to close us out here. Platform, public sector, hybrid, it's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in public sector. And in general, why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that can be programmed and move re-architected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software? What's your thoughts? Yeah, all good points. Anna and I will agree with Dave. Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, hybrid was consuming an address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that. But today I do agree that hybrid cloud is all about a vehicle, a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an open shift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily move them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions we're designing today, they are data center agnostic. We're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions are can just lift and move in a very easy manner. So that's my take on hybrid cloud. And I would say, Deloitte and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking, help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift Lab environment. And we've done this purposefully to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered very, very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. Dave, Mike, thank you for coming on. I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you, John. All right, this is theCUBE coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.