 We are wrapping up day two of the Cube's coverage here at the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Rebecca Knight, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, we started off the morning with Jim Whitehorse, CEO of Red Hat, saying planning is dead. We work so hard to inform the community that we're going to be able to do it. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. It's so hard to infer order where there is none. You're an analyst, you're a forecaster, so I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's not, it's, stop trying. Yeah, thanks Rebecca, it's been great. Yeah, no, it's funny, right, I've looked at this from the analyst world, read a book recently called Black Swan by Nassim Tlaib, talks about how really trying to predict some of these big game changers is really challenging. That being said, I've been involved and I remember playing with the internet when the first graphical browsers came out and being like, this is going to be a game changer. I had no idea where it was going, but there, I happened to be involved really early in the VMware virtualization days. I started talking to Docker really early. I don't say I'm predicting the future, but here at Red Hat, communities, we asked Jim Whitehurst about, you build on communities and I feel I've got a pretty strong network. I'm tied in a lot through social these days and I feel like I can kind of get the where's the interesting stuff happening and where is it just maybe a little bit to the hype doesn't meet their reality and one of the other things, right, is how long it takes for certain technologies to kind of mature, what it will look like when it comes through. It's easier to bet on the waves as opposed to some of the particular tools out there. We really love the conversation with Jim Whitehurst. I always feel like I'm doing one of those executive case studies that you take at a good business school when you get to sit down and talk with them. I agree. He's a great conversationalist, a great guy. During his keynote and even when he sat down with us, he was talking about the management challenge of technology leaders today. This is reflective of the theme of this year's conference which is empowering the individual and he said that the role of the leader today is to create the context for the individual to try and modify and try again and fail. My question for you is it implies that the individual was unempowered beforehand. Is that accurate? Did engineers not have a voice? Yeah, no. What is the role of the individual worker? Do they know where they're going? Do we have a shared clear vision? You talk about most companies, they have their mission statement and you do studies and 70 to 80% of most people in companies are like, I'm disconnected from the work. I don't understand how what I do translates to where I'm going. Red Hat is an interesting, different company. About 10,000 people, we've heard from many of the Red Hatters that it doesn't feel and act like that company. Go back to, this is the military style hierarchy that most businesses have. The structure there, Red Hat is a lot flatter. We talk in the DevOps world about two pizza groups. Red Hat's involved in all of these various projects. Hundreds of them that they're involved. It's not one or two open source things. It's all over the place. You put your business hat on, okay, how do you understand which do you drive and which one's great money and how are you working in the right place or are people just contributing to stuff that you hope if I put good stuff out there in good code, eventually it will translate to our business. But Red Hat keeps delivering, keeps growing their base. They've made certain acquisitions and they keep moving forward. I want to talk about those acquisitions because we had some ansible people on the show here today. It seems as though the acquisition has really gone well and the two companies are blending and it's setting itself up for success. Is that your take too? What do you see as potential obstacles down the road? Rebecca, we got to talk with three different angles of the ansible team today and 18 months after the acquisition it's really broadly integrated. I can tell you I've worked in big companies. I've worked through a number of acquisitions. 18 months from acquisition to oh my gosh, their secret sauce is like all over the place. I'm like that is quite impressive. It shows they're a software company. They are agile in their development and they get to move things forward. I had heard great things about ansible before the acquisition. I hear good things from customers that are using it. Some of the other companies in the space that are standalone have been facing some challenges. The third interview that we did I talked a little bit about how cloud providers are starting to build some of those pieces in. Infrastructure companies have known for a long time that management is one of those big challenges. Management still seems to be one of those jump balls. It feels like that beach ball bouncing around and everybody's trying to get a hold of it. Red Hat's figuring out how to bake ansible in. Make sure it's touching open shifts specifically. All those things like the cloud forms and insights and all the other pieces. Building in more automation fits a lot with what they're doing and how the Linux administrators understand how to do things. They always wanted to get past, oh great, I have to go create yet another script and another script and another script. They'll do that. It seems to be a great acquisition for them and helping to move them forward in a lot of spaces. Another buzzword we heard a lot today and it's going to be funny that I'm going to describe this as a buzzword but it's simple, simplified. This is what we kept hearing again from partners saying that this is what they're hearing from customers because they just have so many different applications. They've got old infrastructure, new infrastructure, they've got hybrid and they just want things to work together and play nicely. They're coming out with solutions. Are they solutions? Are they in fact simpler? What's your take? Are you skeptical that things are in fact getting simpler? Yeah, Rebecca, there's a line I use. The simple enterprise is an oxymoron. It does not exist. If you look at any enterprise today, how many applications do they have? Do you have hundreds of applications or thousands of applications depending on how old you are and what the size of your company is? Everything in IT is additive. We had somebody on this week who was talking about the AS400 sitting in the back. We had HPE on. I'm sure they've got lots of customers still running Superdome. We've covered the main frame pieces. Red Hat Enterprise Linux lives on lots of these environments so we're going to standardize the software pieces but there's only pieces of the puzzle that I can simplify and really building software that can live in many environments and help me move towards more composable or distributed architectures is the way we need to go. I like Red Hat stories to where they're taking us but I think if you talk to most IT staffs even if they're like, oh yeah, we're doing a lot of public cloud or we've standardized on a couple of pieces of things most people don't think that IT is simple. And then there's the cost too. I think that one of our guests made this point about proprietary software and how it really is, it has a higher bar because customers are going to say why can't I just get this on open source? Why do I have to pay for this? And so that's another question too. Where are you seeing the financials of this all play out? Yeah, it's interesting. We're talking a lot about hybrid cloud and when we first started talking public cloud it was like, oh wait, it'll be cheaper and then it's like wait, no, it'll help me be more agile and maybe that will then lead to cost. It was like the old faster, cheaper, better there are certain people in the development culture that's like, well, if I can just do faster, faster, faster it will make up for everything else. Then again, if we move too fast sometimes we're breaking things we're not being able to take advantage of things. So it goes back, is this that simple? It sure doesn't sound simple. So IT is a complex world. Pricing is one of those things that absolutely is getting sorted out. Red Hat has a nice position in the marketplace when I look at the big companies in the market you need to take software companies like Microsoft or Oracle. One of the first things most people think about when you hear those companies is like, oh, their price. Red Hat has broad adoption and a lot of customers and do I hear issues here or there on certain product lines where yes, they'd like it cheaper or there, yes, but it's not a general complaint. Oh, well, hey, you want to do, you know, let's just use the Fedora version or the CentOS version rather than the full enterprise version and they have some sliders to be able to, you know, manage with that. You know, starting to hear more, you know, kind of the elastic cloud like pricing from Red Hat and some of their partners that they solution these pieces with. So yeah, you know, pricing isn't simple yet. It's definitely something that we're going to see more and more as we kind of get to that cloud like model. Today, particularly in the morning keynote, some of the use cases were from the government. We had three, including British Columbia which we just had on our show, also Singapore. So it sounds as though government is saying, wait, what is this open source? This can really help us. This can help us engage our citizens and help make their lives easier. And also, by the way, make it easier for us to govern. Do you, will government sort of always lag behind or do you think that there is a possibility that government could really lead the way on a lot of these things? Well, it's funny because we've known for a long time that government typically doesn't get a lot of budget. So when they go to do something, first of all, they sometimes can leapfrog a generation or two because they've waited, they've waited, they've waited, and I can't necessarily upgrade it so I might need to skip a generation. Secondly, you know, government has, we talk about things like IoT and all of those data points out there. Data has gravity, data's the new oil. Government has a lot of data. Interesting, you just interviewed British Columbia. I'm sure there's the opportunity there that data can be leveraged and turned into more value. Working with entrepreneurs, working with communities, government now sits in a place where if they can be a little bit more open and they can take advantage of this new opportunity, they can actually be on the vanguard of some of these new technologies. Anything you got from your interviews? Yes, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that one of the things that really struck me was the recruiting and retention piece because that seems to be one of the hardest things. If you're a hot coder, an engineer who's graduating from one of the best schools, it's going to take a lot to get you to go work for the government, it just will. Rebecca, I did like, you know, when I was in college, I did internship for a municipal government. I digitized all their land management, did a whole database creation, and did one of those things. The old process took two months, and when I was done with it, it could be anywhere from two minutes to maybe a little bit longer, but boy, that was a painful summer to work through some of the processes. Their infrastructure was all antiquated. Great people, but government moved at a slower speed than I'm used to. And that is what I got out of my interview. So they are using the same kind of tools that these coders and developers would be using in the private sector. They're also doing smaller engagements. So you're not signing your life away to the government. You're able to work on a stint here, a stint there. You can do it in your free time and then get paid on PayPal. So I think that that is one way to attract good talent. Stu, we got one more day of this. What do you hope to see tomorrow? What are you going to be looking for? What do you want to be talking about tomorrow at this time? Well, what we always get here is a lot of really good customers. I love the innovation stories. Right past the hallway here, there's all of these pictures. And Red Hat's a great partner for us on theCUBE. They've brought us many of those customers. We're going to have more of them on. Another two keynotes, a full day of coverage. So we'll see how many people make it to the morning keynote after going to Fenway tonight. 4,000 people, pretty impressive. I think we'll see... It's not like we'll see more Red in the audience than usual at a game at Fenway. But yeah, you wrote for the home team. I'm a transplant here. Go Pat. Okay, alright. That's the argument I think that they were hoping for. So I want to thank you so much. It's been great doing this with you. And I hope you will join us tomorrow for day three of the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Thank you and see you tomorrow.