 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guest, Taylor Holloway, Chief Technology Officer at Advent One. Taylor, welcome to theCUBE from down under in Australia and we're in Palo Alto, California. How are you? Well, thanks, John. Thanks very much, glad to be on here. Love the virtual theCUBE, love the virtual events. We can get to talk to people really quickly with click. Great conversation here around hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and all things software enterprise. Before we get started, I want to take a minute to explain what you guys do at Advent One. What's the main focus? Yeah, so we have a lot of customers in different verticals. So generally what we provide depends on the particular industry the customer is in. But generally speaking, we see a lot of demand for operational efficiency, helping our clients tackle cyber security risks, adopt type of cloud and set them up to modernize the applications. And this has been a big wave coming in for sure with cloud and scale. So I got to ask you, what are the main challenges that you guys are solving for your customers and how are you helping them overcome, come that way and transform it in an innovative way? Yeah, look, I think helping our clients improve their security posture is a big one. We're finding as well that our customers are gaining a lot of operational efficiency by adopting sort of open source technology, Red Hat's an important partner of ours as his IBM. And we're seeing them sort of move away from some more proprietary solutions. And automation is a big focus for us as well. We've had some great outcomes with our clients around helping them automate and deliver the stand up and day two operations environment so a lot quickly, a lot more easily. And to be able to sort of apply some standards across multiple sort of areas of their IT estate. What are some of the solutions that you guys are doing with IBM's portfolio and the IT infrastructure side? You got Red Hat, you got a lot of open source stuff to meet the needs of clients. What do you mean, what's the main product? Yeah, look, I think on the storage side, we probably help our clients sort of tackle the expanding data in structured and particularly unstructured data that they're trying to take control of. So looking at spectrum scale and those types of products from an IBM perspective for unstructured data is a good example and sort of their flash systems for sort of more block storage and sort of more run in the mill sort of environments. We have helped our clients consolidate and modernize on IBM power systems. Having Red Hat as both a Linux operating system and having OpenShift as a container platform really helps there and Red Hat also provides sort of a management overlay which has been great on what we do with IBM power systems. We've been working on a few different sort of use cases on power in particular sort of more recently. SAP HANA is a big one where we've had some success with our clients migrating Mahana onto IBM power systems and we've also helped our customers improve some environments on the other end of the side such as the IBMI and we still have a large number of customers with IBMI and how do we help them? Some of them are moving to cloud in one way or another. Others are consuming some kind of IS and we can sort of wrap around a managed service to help them through. So I got to ask you the question, you know, you CTO you play with a lot of technologies obviously Kubernetes has become this lingua franca for this kind of like I would call a middleware kind of orchestration layer. Containers obviously are awesome but I got to ask you when you walk into a client's environment you don't have to name names but you know usually you see kind of two pictures man they need some serious help or they got their act together. So either way they're both opportunities for hybrid cloud how do you evaluate the environments when you go in when you walk into those two scenarios what goes through your mind what's some of the conversations that you guys have with those clients? Can you take me through a kind of day in the life of both scenarios the ones that are like I can't get the job done I'm so close and I'm the right team and the other ones like we're grooving we're kicking butt. Yeah so let's start well I suppose to start off with you try and take somewhat of a technology agnostic view and just sort of sit down and listen to what they're trying to achieve how they're going for customers who have got it as you say all nailed down things are going really well. It's just really understanding well what can we do to help there is there an opportunity for us to help at all. Like generally speaking there's always going to be something and it may be we don't try and if someone's going really well they might just want someone to help with a bespoke use case or something very specific where they need help. On the other end of the scale where a customer is sort of pretty early on and starting to struggle we generally try and help them not boil the ocean at once just try and get some wins pick some key use cases deliver some value back and then sort of grow it from there rather than trying to go into a customer and trying to do everything at once tends to be a challenge just understand what the priorities are and help them get going. What's the impact been for Red Hat in your customer base? A lot of overlap some overlap no overlap coming together what's the general trend that you're seeing what's the reaction been? Yeah I think it's been really good obviously IBM have a lot of focus on cloud packs where they're bringing their software on Red Hat OpenShift that will run on multiple clouds so I think that's one that we'll see a lot more of over time. Also helping customers automate their IT operations with Ansible is one we do quite a lot of and there's some really bespoke use cases we've done with that as well as some standardized ones so helping with day two operations and all that sort of thing but there's also some really sort of out there things customers have needed to automate it's been a challenge for them and being able to use open source tools to do it has worked really well and we've had some good wins there. You know I want to ask you about the architecture and then just some simplify it real just for the sake of DevOps and segmentation you got hybrid cloud, say K, programmable infrastructure and then you got modern applications that need to have AI some have said I've even said on theCUBE and other broadcasts that if you don't have AI you're going to be at a handicap some machine learning, some data has to be in there. You're going to probably see AI and mostly everything as you go in and try to architect that out for customers and help them get to a hybrid cloud infrastructure with real modern application front end with using data. What's the playbook? Do you have any best practices or examples you can share or scenarios or visions that you see playing out? I think the first one is obviously making sure customers data is in the right place. So if they might be wanting to use some machine learning in one particular cloud provider and they've got a lot of their applications and data in another how do we help them make it mobile and be able to move data from one cloud to another or back into a core data center? So there's a lot of that I think that we spend a lot of time with customers to try and get a right architecture and also how do we make sure it's secure from end to end? So if they're moving things from into multiple one or more public clouds as well as maybe in their own data center making sure connectivity is all set up properly all the security requirements are met. So I think we sort of look at it from a from a high level design point of view we look at it obviously what the target state is going to be versus the current state that really take into account security performance connectivity and all those sort of things to make sure that they're going to have a good result. You know, one of the things you mentioned and this comes up a lot of my interviews with partners of IBM is they always comment about their credibility and all the normal stuff but one of the things that comes out a lot pretty much consistently is their experience in verticals they just have such a track record in verticals and this is where AI and machine learning data has to be very much scoped in on the vertical you can't generalize and have a general purpose data plane inside of vertically specialized kind of focus. How do you see that evolving? How does IBM play there with this kind of the horizontally scalable mindset of a hybrid model both on-premise and in the cloud but at that still same provide that intimacy with the data to fuel the machine learning or NLP or power that AI which seems to be critical. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a lot of services where you know, public cloud providers are bringing out new services all the time and some of it is pre-canned and easy to consume. I think what IBM from what I've observed has been really good at is handling some of those really bespoke use cases. So if you have a particular vertical with a challenge you know, there's going to be sort of things that are pre-canned that you can go and consume but if you need to do something custom that could be quite challenging how do they sort of build something that could be quite specific for a particular industry and then obviously being able to repeat that afterwards. So for us that's obviously something we're very interested in. Yeah, I love chatting with you love getting the low down also people might not know you're a co-author of a book performance guy with IBM power systems. So I got to ask you since I got you here and this, I don't mean to put you on the spot but if you can just share your vision or any kind of anecdotal observation as people start to put together their architecture and again, you know beauties in the eye the beholder every environment is different but still hybrid distributed concept is distributed computing. Is there a KPI? Is there a best practice on as a manager or a systems architect to kind of keep an eye on what good is and how good becomes better because of day two operations becomes a super important concept we're seeing some call AI ops where okay I'm provisioning stuff out on a hybrid cloud operational environment but now day two hits or things happen as more stuffs entered into the equation. What's your vision on KPIs and management? What to keep track of? I think obviously attention to detail is really important to be able to build things properly. A good KPI particularly in our managed service area that I'm curious at understanding is how often do you actually have to log into the systems that you're managing? So if you're logging in and SSHing into servers and all this sort of stuff all the time all of your automation and configuration management is not set up properly. So really a good KPI an interesting one is how often do you log into things all the time? If something went wrong would you sooner go and build another one and shoot the one that failed or go and restore them back up? So thinking about how well things are automated if things are immutable using infrastructure as code those are things that I think are really important when you look at how is something gonna be scalable and easy to manage going forward? What I'd hate to see is where someone builds something and automates it all in the first place and they're too scared to run it again afterwards in case it breaks something. It's funny that the next generation of leaders probably won't even know like, hey, Taylor and John they had to log into systems back in the day. I could be like a story they tell their kids but no, that's a good metric. This is automation. So it's on the next level let's go to the next level automation. What's the low hanging fruit for automation because you're getting at really kind of the killer app there which is self-healing systems good networks that are programmable but automation will define more value. What's your take? I think the main thing is where you start to move from a model of being able to start small and automate individual things which could be patching or system provisioning or anything like that. But what you really wanna get to is to be able to drive everything through Git. So instead of having a written up paper change request I'm gonna change your system and all the rest of it it really should be driven through a pull request and have things through Git and build pipelines to go and make a change run it in development and make sure it's successful and then it goes and gets pushed into production. That's really where I think you wanna get to and you can start to have a lot of people collaborating really well on a particular project or customer that also have some sort of guard rails around what happens in some level of governance rather than being a bit of a free for all. Okay, final question. Where do you see Advent One headed? What's their future plans to continue to be a leader? IT service part leader for these IBM's infrastructure portfolio. I think it comes down to people in the end so really making sure that we partner with our clients and to be well positioned to understand what they wanna achieve and have the expertise in our team to bring to the table to help them do it. I think Open Source is a key enabler to help our clients adopt a hybrid cloud model which we sort of touched on earlier as well as be able to make use of multiple clouds where it makes sense. From a managed service perspective I think everyone is really considering themselves a next-gen managed service provider but what that means for us is to provide a differentiated managed service and also have the strong technical expertise to back it up. Taylor Holloway, Chief Technology Officer, Advent One remote videoing in from down under in Australia. I'm John Furrier in Pella Welta with CUBE Coverage, a IBM thing. Taylor, thanks for joining me today from theCUBE. Thank you very much. Okay, CUBE Coverage, thanks for watching.