 I, from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE here live at Gillette Stadium for the VTUG 10th year of this user conference, really helping customers talk about not just the great growth of virtualization, but transitioning and understanding how clouds and DevOps are coming into play. Happy to have you on the program for the first time. Scott Harold, who's a product manager inside Red Hat. Scott, welcome to the program for the first time. Thanks for having me, Stu. All right, so you gave a keynote this morning. You know, before we get into it, tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of your background, what led you to Red Hat and what your role is inside the company. Yeah, you know, I've been in the virtualization space for about as long as most people have been. 10 to 12 years now, did a couple of books on VMware, ESX2, VI3, got a real job, got into the software business, not a consulting, came in through VisionCore. You know, way back in the early days, VisionCore, of course, was acquired by Quest Software, Quest Software was acquired by Dell. And I needed a little break, so after that I took a little time off and ended up looking for some opportunities and I saw an opportunity with Red Hat to help them drive their virtualization strategy and I figured I could probably do that. And here I am. All right, great, so, you know, we were talking before, you know, most people know Red Hat. I mean, I think I got my first Red Hat hat, you know, 15 years ago, almost, it seemed. It's worth its weight in gold, so. Yeah, well, I mean, it feels like the hat hasn't changed a lot in those times. Every, even at this event, you can go get, you know, a nice red baseball cap. But, you know, everybody knows Red Hat for Linux, but, you know, Red Hat's been doing a lot more. On theCUBE, you know, we've been lucky to really talk about what's going on and been at the center of it, at Red Hat Summit, at many other conferences. So, you know, you're heavily involved in virtualization. You know, talk about Red Hat's positioning, the solution set and, you know, what's involved. Yeah, you know, when you look at Red Hat, what's one of the things that we realize, and you're seeing that from the other, you know, traditional vendors in this space, you know, Microsoft. It's not just an operating system anymore. There's so much more to IT that if we continue to shoehorn ourselves into being just an operating system, our growth is limited. So what we're looking at is there's a lot of modernization that is happening around the market. You know, virtualization is core to a lot of that. You can't do OpenStack without the KDM hypervisor or solid hypervisor underneath. We're looking at container technologies. How are people trying to get to that next generation? And it's really interesting, because those are demands that are being driven top down from developers, but it's causing a major infrastructure and architecture challenge for traditional IT administrators. And that's where we're coming in in our position, is we still need to maintain our relationship with that, you know, traditional IT data center, but still meet the demands of the business and the developers that need to be more agile, meet the demands of the business as they move on towards needing to prevail, to provision at massive, massive scale in seconds. Yeah, so, you know, one of the challenges I have, you know, when I talk to users is, you know, first of all, Red Hat does a lot more now. You know, not only is Linux ubiquitous, but I mean, open source projects are everywhere. There's so many different pieces. And I mean, you rattled off, you know, there's open stack stuff going on, you know, we see what, you know, Red Hat's doing, you know, with some of the large cloud providers, you know, things like containerization and Docker. There's a lot, you know, how does everybody make sense? And, you know, where does, you know, how does Red Hat fit in as one of the strategic, you know, partners for customers? Yeah, you know, what we're looking at is, again, how we help them ease into this transformation that's happening. One of the things that we actually see and realize is traditional virtualization is actually still growing and growing fairly rapidly. There's a lot of opportunity there. So we want to continue to service aspects of that market, but we know that ultimately, we are going to lose market share to these modernization technologies. And the approach that we took at looking at that is, yes, we are good at building platforms. How can we get people into a virtualization platform? How can we get them into a cloud platform, a container platform? And one of the things that had been historically missing from Red Hat was, how do we help them manage that? And I think that's one of the things that we got in with the managed IQ acquisition and now the Red Hat CloudForms product is it actually allows people to help kind of consolidate and centralize that operational management, regardless if they want to provision something to Azure or EC2 or Hyper-V, VMware, Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, our own solutions. How do we centralize the operational aspects in the consumerization of the infrastructure, regardless of where and how this backend is configured? You know, that plays into the container strategy, it plays into the cloud strategy, and it plays into the traditional physical and virtualization space. And we see now that management really is the key to tying that together and being a good differentiator for Red Hat, taking that open source approach and really kind of being the Switzerland around all these technologies, even those that some may think that we are highly competitive with. Yeah, that's a great point, because I think back a few years ago, all the discussion was like, oh, well, VMware's dominant in the hypervisor space, what is Microsoft going to do? And then there's free-ish versions from KVM and Red Hat, Enterprise virtualization. And it needs to be, it's not just about kind of the tool of the hypervisor, it's really more about the platform, the management, helping the business solve what they need to do. Yeah, and making sure that the business has choice. Again, another core tenant of Red Hat is avoiding some of that vendor lock-in. Will we like to have the customers? Absolutely. Do we work with multiple technologies, multiple stacks? That's one of our core value propositions. And we feel that open source actually makes that easier for us. And you see us entering into some strategic relationships that two, three years ago you would have asked if you would have ever had executives from Microsoft and Red Hat standing on the same stage together. People would have laughed at you. Microsoft's changing, Red Hat's changing. We're getting more established in the market. People are realizing that. And I think from a virtualization standpoint, the best thing that happened to us was open stack. It really kind of set the stage that forced people to pause and say, wait a second, KVM's not just a toy. It has legitimacy in enterprise scale, mission critical performance. And that's been one of the best things, I think, to happen to Red Hat. Well, some of our earlier investments in KVM, getting to that point now has actually legitimized that as a solid hypervisor alternative with solid management solutions around that to give people choice and alternatives in a market that's continuing to change around us. Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at Wikibon is to really get value out of IT. It needs to be more than just kind of virtualizing the environment. What we put out a definition, what we call true private cloud. So there needs to be the automation, there needs to be management, needs to, not saying that everything goes public, public cloud, but I need to understand kind of the efficiencies and the utility that I can get from a public cloud and having some similar capabilities in whatever on-prem solution I have or if maybe I'm partnering with service providers to invite that to do that, but IT needs to get out of some of the day-to-day activities and therefore the management and orchestration layers are going to help with a lot of that. Yeah, and that's really where that cloud form strategy for us comes into play is, again, we're open, we have providers into Hyper-V, into VMware, into Rev. And regardless of what that underlying platform is, you have the same problems, you have the same operational challenges. How do I manage capacity? How do I optimize my workloads? How do I manage my provisioning and life cycle of these VMs? And then even if you take those problems and start to scale it out to cloud, one of the things that I like to mention is the concept of VM sprawl isn't limited to private cloud. You start getting VM sprawl into public cloud, now it actually costs you real money if you have these ghost instances running out on Amazon. And that needs to be controlled and we are taking that approach of supporting these multiple platforms to help people consolidate that, those operational aspects, because these are real challenges that we see them face. Okay, you used the term earlier, kind of some of the modernization that's going on. What about from the application standpoint? I guess we look at it, Linux tends to be what's underneath most modern applications. So what's Red Hat's positioning? How's Red Hat helping with the application modernization? Yeah, we see obviously a lot of demand from IT operations is always kind of stuck in the middle. We have demands from the business saying, move faster, be more competitive, be more agile than our competitors, or we lose, we fail. And at the same time, the developers have to come up with a way to do that. They need an infrastructure that can support that method and approach. So now more than ever, these developers are saying, even provisioning applications and workloads in minutes isn't enough anymore. We need to have scale in seconds. So that's where we're starting to see the cloud technologies really coming into play. If you really need that massive scale up, scale down, that's where OpenStack can help you scale out and scale in these applications. The applications do need to be built differently than the traditional physical virtual workloads that we've seen the past eight years, 10 years or so. And into, to be more agile, the applications have to be built to scale within the application and not have to rely on the infrastructure for high availability, clustering services. And when you really need massive hyperscale, massive testing, and boot times in seconds, you look at the container technologies which are now coming into play and how you also, similar problems that we see and saw with virtualization are also happening in containers. How do you treat those as groups of hosts? How do you provide high availability services to key aspects of those applications? That's where we're working with, again, more open source projects with Google around the Kubernetes initiatives and how we help manage the entire container stack and really taking a look at the application approach and Red Hat is no stranger to the application space either with a lot of the work that we've done with JBoss. And now getting into OpenShift, how we actually become an application delivery platform that meets those next generation needs and help kind of mask that. The whole concept of that DevOps role was supposed to be that person that sits between IT operations and the developers. I don't think that that role has matured the way that people had expected it to. When I talk to customers, I still go out there and I see it. We see the data center guys, people responsible for the infrastructure, really don't care what runs on the infrastructure as long as no one's yelling at them that it's slow and no one's breaking anything that forces them to go in on the weekends. And at the same time, the developers don't care where their applications run as long as they get the performance that they expect. So there's this balance that has to be done to help maintain that relationship between those two groups. And still a very interesting dynamic and something that Red Hat is still positioned very well to do. Yeah, so Scott, you ran through a bunch of pieces there. I guess if I talk to the typical user here at this conference that said, okay, I'm comfortable with the virtualization. If I line up OpenStack containers and the application, you talk about the OpenShift and JBoss type stuff, where are customers along the readiness for it, using it, and general awareness of those technologies? We're seeing customers are using elements of that. They may be using certain portions of that in different areas. Even the same customer may be using the entire stack just completely independent of knowing that another group is running another part of that overall stack. So it's really, really hard, especially in an event like this, to have a one-size-fits-all solution. So we focused what we talked about. Today was all about virtualization and how to prepare virtualization for that movement to modernization. Is enterprise virtualization going to disappear? Absolutely not. I think that's one of the things that we've learned. Us as Red Hat, the market in general, you're not going to take OpenStack and replace your VMware environment. It's not what it was designed for. It's not going to happen. Enterprise virtualization is here to stay, but you do need to be aware of how the demands of the developers in the business are going to push for more dynamic IT, resourcing, staffing, provisioning, all these processes, and that there are other solutions out there like the OpenStack and the containers that you will hear about. It's not a threat to your job, but definitely take a look at it because you will need to know about those technologies to hold some intelligent conversations and do so and implement that in a way that doesn't disrupt the core business that you've been running. Yeah, so you bring up an interesting point. What do you see as kind of the changing roles of kind of the administrators, the people that probably understand Linux? How are they growing their skills? What's Red Hat doing to help them with kind of their career path? Yeah, Red Hat has extensive training and certification programs across all the different products that we offer. And that's one of the things that we see is the whole open source movement, the Linux administrator role has fundamentally changed over the last four years. Five years ago, when you say UNIX or Linux team, that's the group that sits in the corner that you would go above them and unscrew the light bulb so people didn't have to interact with them and they didn't have to interact with anybody and I think that is changing. We have a younger group of people coming in, even in universities. We're seeing open source technologies being taught. Python is one of the main programming languages that are being taught. Linux is being more heavily used in the academic space so we're starting to get a younger audience in here that really is kind of taking to this open source technology kind of growing up with it and I think that's kind of reinvigorating what we're doing and driving people who are traditionally Linux. Now it's not just an operating system, we have the containers, we have the virtualization aspects, the management aspects, really taking it to that next level and I think it's exciting having almost a new generation come in and reinvigorate what we've been doing, which hasn't changed even comparatively to UNIX, it's very similar methodology that's been in IT for 40 years so we have a new movement around that in which all of these new technologies require Linux knowledge or a Linux base for the containers, the cloud instances, the virtualization, it's really built around a solid Linux core. Yeah, I mean, I definitely hear lots of confirmation in the marketplace for what you're saying. When I talk to younger people that are kind of new getting into working in the IT space there are a lot of times grabbing tools out there and the open source tools are usually the ones that they're starting with and many of these pieces that are out in the marketplace are ones that have kind of come into Red Hat through acquisition and participation from Red Hat. So I guess one of the questions I'd ask in general and you don't speak for the brand and the company but when we think of Red Hat it's much more than Linux now, what's kind of the main things that you're hearing from the customers as to, we've talked to a number of them but I guess maybe summarize for us some of the main couple. Yeah, we're hearing from the customers that they're still a lot of surprise that Red Hat does more than Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The fact that we have a solid virtualization product that the investments that we have in OpenStack, the investments that we have around the various communities and the investments that we make are really all around this broader set of technologies and when you take a look at the matrix of what we're offering versus what Microsoft offers we're actually very well aligned with where the other vendors are going in the market. We're making the smart choices and we do that through community investment and energizing those that are passionate about open source to work with us, develop with us and hire a lot of people and pay them to do their dream job which also helps because they have the passion and they can make a living off of their passion which is always good. Yeah, there's an interesting dynamic in the marketplace. On the one hand, there's so many companies now that are embracing open source. You mentioned Microsoft as one example. I mean, for someone that's been in the industry for a while, I mean it's kind of shocking how much they're involved but on the other hand you say okay, how does Red Hat differentiate then if a lot of people are doing open source but most companies aren't monetizing open source the way that Red Hat does. Yeah, Red Hat, they started early and they didn't give up. They pushed incredibly hard. We started in 1999 I believe. I've only been here two and a half years so the old history, you'd have to ask somebody else but we kept at it. We had a good business model and when Linux was in, it wasn't a trusted technology. The whole open source thing was just unsure and a lot of things that Red Hat did, they just did incredibly well and internally they invested in the right areas. Top tier support, making sure that when someone has a problem with open source they weren't alone in having to go fix the problem or they weren't the ones having to go to the community to find out how to get something fixed. We provided that relationship for that customer to actually provide enterprise support and security for them. The testing that we do, the qualification of applications and hardware. Just making sure that what they get will actually run on what they purchase and it has a certified stack all the way from bare metal up to application workloads, SAP certification, Oracle certification and based off of that progression I think that was actually where Red Hat really took off is when Oracle actually said that Oracle databases are allowed to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's when we really saw the spike from a Linux standpoint and it's something that we've been able to repeat in several different areas and kept the momentum going and turned it into over a $1 billion business. So I guess Scott, you've worked at a few companies and only been in Red Hat for two and a half years but can you say, is the culture different at Red Hat? Jim Whitehurst just wrote a book, your CEO talking about the open organization. We've talked to him about it but just want to get your viewpoint as to pair contrast other companies that you've worked at versus Red Hat. Yeah, no, the culture is open. Everything about Red Hat is open to the core and never in my life have I ever seen a company where someone can tell Jim Whitehurst that he is wrong or full of crap about something and not get fired almost immediately. We're very open to that level of input. It does have some benefits as we get a broad amount of perspective from everybody who's in engineering, who's in the business, who interfaces with customers. What that also does, of course, have some challenges is that everybody has a voice and we need the leaders to be able to trim down the right position of that voice and make business decisions based off of that and that's one of the fun challenges that I have in the virtualization space and everybody has an opinion. Not everybody's right, unfortunately, and we have to make the right choices to help us continue to drive our business forward and I think that even just that open element and the fact that people aren't afraid to say what they think may actually open my mind to alternate ways of thinking about things and that is something that I fully embrace. All right, well, Scott Harold with Red Hat, really appreciate you stopping by. I know you've got a lot of world travels left to do in the coming weeks and months. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here from VTUG at Gillette City and thanks for watching.