 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE and CUBE coverage here with Matt Hicks, Executive Vice President of Products and Technologies at Red Hat CUBE alumni, I've been on many times, knows the engineering side now, running all the products and technologies. Matt, great to see you. Thanks for coming on remote. Thanks John. I wish we were in real life in person, IRL, but doing it remote again, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me today. Hey, so what a year, you know, I was just talking to a friend and another interview with the Red Hat colleague, Shesh, on your team. In 2019, I interviewed Arvin at IBM right before he bought Red Hat and he was smiling on his face and he wasn't even CEO then. He is such a big fan of cloud native and you guys have been the engine underneath the hood, if you will, of IBM and this transformation. Huge push now with COVID and now with visibility into post COVID. You're seeing cloud native at scale with modern applications just highly accelerated across the board in almost every industry, every vertical. This is a very key trend. You guys at the center of it always have been, we've been covering you for many years. Interesting time. And so now you guys are really got the formula at Red Hat. Take us through the key trends that you see on this wave for enterprises and how is Red Hat taking that through? Yeah, no, absolutely, it has been, it's been a great ride. Actually, I remember a couple of years ago standing on stage with Arvin prior to the acquisition. So it's been, it's been a whirlwind but I think if we look at really what emerged in 2020 we've seen three trends that we hope are going to carry through in 2021 just in a better year for that. The first is open hybrid cloud is really how customers are looking to adapt to change. They have to use what they have, assets they have today on premise. We're seeing a lot of public cloud adoption. That blend of being hybrid is just, it is a reality for how customers are having to deliver. Edge computing I think is another area. I would say the trend is really not going to be a fad or a new great tech term. The capabilities of computing at the edge, whether that is automotive vehicles, radio access network capabilities with 5G it's pretty astounding at this point. So I think we're going to see a lot of push and edge computing for computing, getting closer to users. But then also the choice aspect we're seeing with CIOs, we often talk about technology as choice but I think the model of how they want to consume technology has been another really strong trend in 2020 We look at this really as being able to deliver cloud managed services in addition to technology that CIOs run themselves. But those would probably be the three that stand out to me at least in 2020 we've seen. So Matt, take us through in your minds and in Red Hat's perspective, the workloads that are going to be highlighted in this cloud native surge that's happening. We're seeing it everywhere. You mentioned edge, industrial edge to consumer edge to lightweight edge. Massive new workloads. So take us through how you see kind of the existing workloads evolving and potentially new workloads that emerging. Yeah, so I think, you know, first when you talk about edge workloads of a big umbrella but if you look at data driven workloads especially and the machine learning artificial intelligence spectrum of that that's really critical. And a reason that those workloads are important is 5G aside for now, when you're running something at the edge you have to also be able to make decisions pretty well at the edge. And that is, that's where your data is being generated and the ability to act on that closely whether that's executing machine learning models or being able to do more than that with AI that's going to be a really, really critical workload. Couple to that we will see, I think 5G change that because you're going to see more blending in terms of what can you draw back to closer to your data center to augment that. So 5G will shift how that's built but data driven workloads are going to be huge. Then I think another area we'll see is how you propagate that data through environments. Some Kafka has been a really popular technology and we'll actually be launching a service in relation to that but being able to get that data at the edge and bring it back to locations where you might do more traditional processing that's going to be another really key space. And then we'll still have, you know, to be honest there's still a tremendous amount of workloads out there that just aren't going to get rebuilt. And so being able to figure out how can you make them a little more cloud native? You know, the things your companies have run on for the last 20 years being able to step them closer to cloud native I think is going to be another critical focus because you can't just rewrite them all in one phase and you can't leave them there as well. So being able to bridge that will be key too. Yeah, what's interesting if folks following Red Hat know you guys, certainly at the tech chops you guys have great product engineering staff been doing this for a long time. I mean, the common Linux platform that even the new generation probably don't have to leave and load Linux on the server anymore you guys have been doing this hybrid environment in IT for IT stores for decades, okay, in the open. So, you know, with servers, virtualization, you know, private public cloud infrastructures I mean, it's been around. We've been covering it in depth as you know but that's a history. But as you go from a common Linux platform into things with Kubernetes as new technologies and this new abstraction layers, new control plane concept comes to the table this need for a fully open platform seems to be a hot trend this year. How do you describe that? Can you take a minute to explain what this is all about, this new abstraction this new control plane or this open hybrid cloud as you're calling it what is this about? What does it mean? Yeah, no, I'll do a little journey that she talked about of, yeah, this has been our approach for almost a decade at this point. And it started if you look at our approach with Linux and this was before public clouds use environments existed we still with Linux tried to span bare metal and virtualized environments and then eventually private and public cloud infrastructure as well and our goal there was you wanna be able to invest in something and in our world that's something that's also open as in Linux but be able to run it anywhere that's expanded quite a bit that was good for a class of applications that really got us started that's expanded now to Kubernetes for example and Kubernetes is taking that from single machines to cluster wide deployments and it's really giving you that secure flexible fast innovation backbone for cloud native computing and the balance there is just not for cloud native we've got to be able to run traditional emerging workloads and our goal is let those things run wherever well can. So you're really, you're based on open technologies you can run them wherever you have resources to run. And then I think the third part of this for us is having that choice and ability to run anywhere but not be able to manage it can lead to chaos or sprawl and so our investments in our management portfolio and this is from insights to Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management to our cluster security capabilities or Ansible our focus has been securing managing and monitoring those environments so you can have a lot of them you can run where you want but you can sort of treat it as one thing. So our vision, how we've executed up to this point has really been centered around that. I think going forward where you'll see us really try to focus is first you heard Paul announced earlier that we're donating more than a half a billion dollars to open hybrid cloud research. And part of this reason is running services cloud native services is changing and that research element of open source is incredibly powerful. We want to make sure that's continuing but we're also going to evolve our portfolio to support this same drive. Couple areas I would call out we're launching Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and I talked about that combination from RHEL to OpenShift to being able to manage it we're really putting that in one package. So you have the advanced management so if you have huge suites of cloud native real estate there you can manage that. And it also pushes security earlier into the application build workflows. This is tied to some of our technologies bolstered by the stack rocks acquisition that we did. Being able to bring that in one product offering I think is really key to address security and management side. We've also expanded Red Hat Insights beyond RHEL to include OpenShift and Ansible. And this is really targeted at how do we make this easier? How do we let customers lean on our expertise? Not just for Linux as a service but expand that to all of the things you'll use in a hybrid cloud. And then of course we're going to keep pushing Linux innovation. You'll see this with latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux we're going to push barriers, lower barriers to entry but we're also going to be the innovation catalyst for new directions include things like edge computing. So hopefully that sort of helps in terms of where where we started when it was just Linux and then all the other pieces were bringing to the table and why and some new areas we're launching our investment going forward. Yeah, great. That's great to overview. Thanks for taking the time to do that. I think one of the areas that's jumping out at me is the advanced cluster management work you guys are doing. We saw that with the security piece and also Red Hat Insights. I think is another key one and you get the Red Hat Edge. But on the Insights, you mentioned at the top of this interview data workloads pretty much being pretty much everything much more of an emphasis on data in general but also, you know, sort of ability is a hot area. You know, you guys run operating system. So you know in operating systems you need to have the data and understand what's being instrumented. You got to know that you got to have things instrumented and now more than ever having the data is critical. So take us through your vision of insights and how that translates. Cause as you said mentioned, it's inansible. You're seeing a lot more innovations because okay, I could provision everything. That's great cloud and hybrid cloud is good. Okay, thumbs up. Everyone check the box. And then all of a sudden day two as they call day two operations stuff starts to, you know, get, get hairy. They starts to break. Maybe some things are happening. So, so day two is essentially the ongoing operational stability of cloud native. You need insights. You need the data. If you don't have the data you don't even know what's going on. You can't apply machine learning. It's kind of, if you don't get that flywheel going you could be in trouble. Take me through your vision of data driven insights. Yeah, so I think it's two aspects. If you go to these traditional or traditional support models we don't have a lot of insight until there's an issue. And I'm always amazed by what our teams can understand, fix, get customers through those. And I think that's a lot of the success red hats had at the same note, we want to make that better where if you look at rel as an example if we fixed an issue for any customer on the planet of which we fix a lot in the support area we can know whether you're going to hit that same issue or not in a lot of cases. And so that linkage to be able to understand environments better we can be very proactive of not just hey, apply all the updates but without this one update you risk a kernel panic. We know your environment, we see it. This is going to keep you out of that area. The second challenge with this is when things go to break or failing the ability to get that data we want that to be the cleanest handshake possible. We don't want to, those are always stressful times anyway for customers being able to get logs, get access so that our engineering knowledge we can fix it. That's another key part. When you extend this to environments like OpenShift things are changing sort of faster than humans can respond in it. And so those traditional flows can really start to get strained or broken down with it. So when we have connected OpenShift clusters our engineering teams can not only proactively monitor those because we know Kubernetes really well we understand operators really well. We can get ahead of those issues and then use our support teams and capabilities to keep things from breaking. So that's really our goals, finding that balance where we're using our expertise and building the software to help customers stay stable instead of just being in a response mode when things break. Awesome. I think it's totally right on the money and data is critical in all this. I think the trust of having that partnership to know that this pattern recognition is going to be applied from the environment and that's been hurting the cybersecurity market. People that's the biggest discussion I have with my friends and cyber is they don't share the data when they do, things are pretty obvious. So that's good stuff there. And then obviously notifications is proactive before there's a root cause or failure. Great stuff. This brings up a point that Paul Cormier said earlier and I want to get your reactions to this. He said, every CIO is now a cloud operator. That's a pretty bold statement. I mean, that simply means that it's all cloud all the time. Again, we've been saying this on theCUBE for many years, cloud first, whatever people want to call it. What does that actually mean cloud operator? Does that just mean everything's hybrid? Everything's multiple cloud. Take me through and unpack what that actually means. Yeah, no. So I think for the CIO for a lot of times it was largely a technology choice or that was sort of the choice available to them. And especially if you look at what public clouds have introduced, it's not just technology choice. You're not just picking Kafka anymore. For example, you really get to make the choice of do I want to differentiate my business by running it myself? Or is this just technology I want to consume? And I'm going to consume a cloud native service. And other challenges come with that. It's infrastructure not in your control. But when you think about a CIO of the axes they're making decisions on, there are more capabilities now. And I think this is really crucial to let a CIO hone in on where they want to specialize. So what do they want to consume? What do they really want to understand, differentiate and run? And to support this actually, so we're in this vein we're going to be launching three new managed cloud services. And our focus is always going to be hybrid in these. But we understand the importance of having managed cloud services that Red Hat is running, not the customers in this case. So one of those will be Red Hat opening shift streams for Apache Kafka. We've talked about that, that data connectivity and the importance of it. And really being able to connect apps across clouds across data centers using Kafka without having to push developers to really specialize in running it is critical because that is your hybrid data. It's going to be generated on Prim. It's going to be generated at the edge. You need to be able to get access to it. The next challenge for us is once you have that data what do you do with it? And we're launching a Red Hat open shift data science cloud service. And this is going to be optimized for understanding the data that's brought in by streams. And this doesn't matter whether it's an AI service or a business intelligence process. And in this case, you're going to see us leverage our ecosystem quite a bit because that last mile of AI workloads or models will often be completed with partners. But this is a really foundational service for us to get data in and then bring that into a workflow where you can understand it. And then the last one for us is a Red Hat open shift API management. And you can think of this as really the overseer of how apps are going to talk to services. And these environments are complex, they're dynamic and being able to provide that oversight up. How should my apps be consuming all these APIs? How should they be talking? How do I want to control and understand that is really critical. So we're launching these three and it fits in that cloud operator use. We want to give three options where you might want to use Kafka and three scale technologies and open data hub which was the basis of open shift data science but you might not want to specialize in running them. So we can run those for you and give you as a CIO that choice of where you want to invest in running versus just using it. All right, we're here with Matt Hicks who's Executive Vice President of Process Technology at Red Hat. Matt, you're a leader at Red Hat, now part of IBM and continues to operate in the Red Hat spirit innovating out in the open. People are wearing their Red Hat hoodies which has been great to see. I ask every executive this question because I really want to get the industry perspective on this, necessities the mother of invention as they say and goes and this pandemic was a challenge for many in 2020. And then as we're in 2021, some say that even in the fall we're going to start to see a light at the end of the tunnel and then maybe back to real life in 2022. This has opened up huge visibility for CXOs and leaders in the enterprise to say, hey, what's working, what do we need? We didn't prepare for everyone to be working at home. These were great challenges in 2020 and these will fuel the next innovations and achievements going forward. Again, necessities the mother of all invention. Some projects are going to be renewed and doubled down on some probably won't be as hybrid clouds and as open source continues to power through this, there's lessons to be learned. Share your view on what leaders in business can do coming out of the pandemic to have a growth strategy and what can we learn from this pandemic from innovation and how open source can power through this adversity? I think for as many challenging events as we have in 2020, I think for myself at least, it also made me realize what companies including ourselves can accomplish if we're really focused on that. If we don't constrain our thinking too much. I mean, we saw projects that were supposed to take customers 18 months that they were finishing in weeks on it because that was what was required to survive. So I think part of it is 2020 broke a lot of complacency for us. We have to innovate to be able to put ourselves in a growth position. I hope that carries into 2021 that drive that urgency. When we look at open source technologies, I think the flexibility that it provides has been something that a lot of companies have needed in this and that's whether it could be they're having to contract or expand and really having that moment of did the architectural choices, technology choices will they let me respond in the way I need? I'm biased, but first I think open models open source development is the best basis to build that on gives you that flexibility. And honestly, I'm an optimist but I look at 2021, I'm like, I'm excited to see what customers build on sort of the next wave of open innovation. I think as life sort of gets back to normal and we keep that drive and innovation and people are able to collaborate more I hope we'll see a explosion of innovation that comes out and I hope customers see the benefit of doing that on a open hybrid cloud model. No better time now than before all the things are really kind of teed up and lined up to provide that innovation. Matt, great to have you on theCUBE. Take a quick second to explain to the folks watching and in the community, what is Red Hat 2021 about this year and Red Hat Summit? Obviously we're virtual and we're going to be back in real life soon for the next event. What's the big takeaway this year for the Red Hat community and the community at large for Red Hat in context of the market? You know, I think Red Hat, you'll keep seeing us push open source based innovation. There's some really exciting spaces, whether that is getting closer and closer towards edge which opens up incredible opportunities or providing that choice even down to consumption model like cloud managed services. And it's in that drive to let customers have the tools to build the next incredible innovations for them. So that's what Summit 2021 is going to be about for us. And congratulations to the entire team for the donation to the academic community open cloud initiative and these things you're doing to promote this next generation of SREs and large cloud scale operators and developers. So congratulations on that props. Thanks, John. Okay, Matt Hicks, executive vice president of products and technology at Red Hat here on theCUBE, CUBE coverage of Red Hat 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.