 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit. Of course, it's happening digitally. We're interviewing Red Hat executives, customers and partners around the globe who are going to be part of this digital event and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni. I do hope it's Gerald who's the Vice President General Manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. Last time I caught up with Joe was at Ansible Fest last year and Joe, so fourth year in a row, you've been on theCUBE here at Red Hat Summit. Thanks so much for joining us again. Thanks for having me back, Stu. I'm happy to be here. All right, so Joe, I think it actually makes sense for us to kind of pick up the conversation where we left it off at Ansible Fest last year. So Ansible Fest, it's all about automation. You're really helping with digital transformation, what companies are going through. In today's day and age, automation and being able to be more agile. Of course, everybody for the most part is working from home, being able to enable things remote. The adoption of cloud is even more consideration. So what are there? And since we last talked, obviously things have changed for everyone some, but give us the latest from your organization. Thanks Stu. Well, we met at Ansible Fest in Atlanta last fall. We were talking about strategic use of automation. In today's current crisis, if you will, there's a lot of folks who are leaning on automation in a much more immediate and tactical way. We're seeing a lot of Ansible automation being used by folks to deploy either infrastructure they need to deal with capacity and surge demand that they have right now. We're seeing people use it for things like working from home because they can't get access to gear. We're seeing bursting to public clouds because they can't add more physical equipment, perhaps in the data center. So last year, we were excited to talk to you about strategic automation. That's still really important, but right now a lot of folks have more pressing matters in terms of automating to get through the current crisis. Coming to you from Northern New Jersey, which is certainly a hotspot and certainly have a lot of appreciation for the folks in the front lines that are taking care of us and protecting us and things like that. We want to do everything we can as a company, as Red Hat to enable folks to do whatever they need to do to be able to get through this crisis. You know, absolutely, Joe. Very important topics there. In the keynote for Red Hat Summit, there's discussion of your group. And of course, management has always been a critical piece of how we look at overall IT. When I first became an analyst, the joke was, well, you know, security and management, we can always kind of poke at those pillars as to things we need to do as an industry to make things better. Specifically, we've been talking for years about the growth of containerization and Kubernetes of course, Red Hat, strong leadership position with OpenShift. My understanding, if I heard right from the keynote, it's the advanced cluster management is the new piece. Can you give us a little bit about the team, the technology, how this fits into the overall Red Hat portfolio? Sure, so we're super excited around advanced cluster management. It turns out that we have a lot of customers that are running OpenShift to deploy their container-based applications. And as they evolve, they inevitably end up with multiple clusters, either based on separation of duties or in lines of business, perhaps for distributed availability zones and things like that with their clusters. So they inevitably back into a multi-cluster scenario. What we've done is working with IBM would develop some very rich technology around advanced management for multi-cluster environments built from scratch for container environments in Kubernetes. We worked with IBM and we moved that technology over to Red Hat and when the process is doing two things. One is we're announcing tech preview here at Summit of that technology and when the process for open sourcing that technology because we're Red Hat and everything we do is open source, we're going to take some of the most advanced container management, cluster management technology in the world that we've gotten from IBM and we're going to open source that. What we're excited here is that we're going to provide this Red Hat offering advanced cluster management to help people who are struggling with managing multiple clusters. Yeah, Joe, absolutely a super important point. Anybody that's watched this space for the last few years, simplicity has not been the word that people have used for it. And over the last year, there's been a lot of announcements from some of the major players in the industry about how do I manage those multiple cluster environments. So, Joe, if I think back two years ago, it was, you know, here's the best way to run Kubernetes. And when you talk to a lot of customers, it was, well, they were starting with offense spinning their own because that was what it was available. And the number one choice that I usually heard from customers was, oh, if I'm a Red Hat customer, I started using OpenShift and I'd start using OpenShift everywhere. Fast forward to where we are today. Of course, you have lots of customers running OpenShift, but also in the public clouds if I'm using Amazon, Google, Microsoft, other platform environments, often there's the native Kubernetes and I need to manage across those environments. So, do I understand right, ACM, is that going to help me, not only with my OpenShift, but as it moves forward also manage some of those other Kubernetes environments and how does Red Hat approach this kind of the same or differently from what I hear from, from Microsoft with ARC, with VMware, with Tanzu. So, ACM Advanced Cluster Management from Red Hat supports any standard Kubernetes environment. One of the advantages we have working in an OpenShift environment is OpenShift has a lot of functionality besides Kubernetes. In other words, it's already a layer of sophistication built on top of Kubernetes. So, OpenShift itself provides a lot of management automation. Now you add advanced cluster management on top of that, which will be able to import other Kubernetes clusters from other environments, but the ability for it to take advantage of the sophistication that's already in OpenShift and then leverage things like Ansible Automation and then some of the management SaaS services, cloud.redhat.com, or connect to customer experience and the ability to proactively look at OpenShift clusters and be able to, in some cases, tell people about problems they're having before they even realize they have the problem. That combination of management and automation on top of the already rich OpenShift environment really puts us a couple of rungs up in terms of capabilities beyond a standard Kubernetes vanilla environment. Yeah, Joe, one of the reasons I was looking forward to this conversation is one of the things that we've been looking at for the last few years is how is multi-cloud the same or different from what we had done back 10, 15 years ago with multi-vendor? And I think anybody that's been around long enough and you talk about management in a multi-vendor environment and you think about the leading tools from a software standpoint we're out there and it gives us a little bit of flashbacks and it's not in a good way. So what have we learned as an industry and you talked about integration with Ansible, the automation, how do we make sure that we aren't repeating the sins of the past with these new generation of management tools? Well, what we've seen is that enterprises are inherently going to be hybrid and multi-cloud. Red Hat's been talking about open hybrid cloud for almost eight years, right? So our CEO, Paul Cormier, sort of anticipated this, which was pretty insightful eight years ago because everybody thought then that people are going to move exclusively to public cloud. It wouldn't have any data centers, it wouldn't have any hardware anywhere. Fast forward why you've got data centers, edge multiple public clouds with services that are all over those different footprints. We believe that unlike the past when you had heterogeneous systems management, right? Where you had different platforms that you were trying to manage as lowest common denominator, as a common platform. Now what Red Hat is offering is OpenShift, which will run on all the public clouds as well as on your physical and virtual hardware in the data centers and at the edge. So basically provides a consistency, which means that the management can then talk to a consistent environment, provide a much higher level of hybrid cloud management and trying to either have silos of different management tools, by cloud, by vendor, by environment and then try to federate at a lowest common denominator. Like you'll see Kubernetes management tools, for example, that have to use the lowest sort of common denominator, which are the straight Kubernetes APIs. We could take advantage of those, but also the additional functionality that OpenShift brings in, for example, with the other capabilities. So it allows us to have a higher level of management and provide that consistency by having the same hybrid cloud platform, in this case OpenShift, run across those different environments. Yeah, Joe, one of the things that also concerns me a little bit as the industry, when they talk about Kubernetes, it's very much a discussion of the infrastructure piece. But we know this move to cloud native is very much about the application and the application development. So help me understand a little bit how that overall story for kind of the app dev, the ICD, all those pieces fit into your story. I know it was one of the major points of discussion at Ansible Fest. Yeah, so it is really all about the application, right? People really don't want to think about the infrastructure. They want to think about the application. That's really what's driving their business and their differentiation. In the case of OpenShift, OpenShift provides application lifecycle management for Kubernetes environments. Our advanced cluster management sort of takes that a step further and allows you to extend that lifecycle so that you can deploy applications based on policy to different environments based on needs, keeps compliance and security and all those things in force, regardless of how many different places that you're actually deploying the application. So it's not just as easy as taking an application and deploying it to one location. People want to be able to continuously update their applications and deploy it to all of the places that it needs to be, they're based on availability, their proximity, security, environments and things like that. And that presents a hard challenge. And so that's why some of the tools like Advanced Cluster Management are exactly designed to help with those kind of new application life cycles people are looking for. All right, Joe, you talked about that some of the technology for ACM came from the IBM side. Give us the update, when you look at the IBM Cloud portfolio, how is your group really interacting and supporting and working with the overall IBM solutions? So IBM has a very robust portfolio and they have a number of cloud packs in their portfolio that address things like applications and data and management and things like that. So IBM in this case had developed some Advanced Cluster Management technology but it was not open sourced and it wasn't available to other folks. One of the challenges with that is that we believe as Red Hat that the innovation is happening at open source. If you develop something in a close proprietary way it may be the best thing in the world today, the year, two years, three years from now there are other projects and there are other technologies that are being collaborated on and open that are going to basically leave you behind, right? So we think open is the future. So in this case, in working with IBM, we took some very advanced technology, we moved it over to Red Hat and now we're in the process of open sourcing it as well as providing an enterprise consumable version of that technology in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. IBM again, has to support a much broader diverse environment, right? In terms of everything from mainframes to edge and containers and VMs and physical machines, applications that span decades. So they have a much bigger sort of target environment that they have to work in. Red Hat's focused on the future. We're really sort of skating to where the puck is, if you will, they use a hockey analogy where basically we're trying to anticipate what enterprises are going to need and address that with not only the platforms but the management automation you're going to need to be successful with those platforms. Yeah, Joe, I want you to bring us into your customers and you talk about all these changes that are happening in the landscape and how they manage it. Any insight you can give as to organizational structures? I remember last year at Summit, I talked to a number of companies going through digital transformation and we know that there is as much, if not more organizational change that needs to happen along with the technology pieces. So from your world, who's kind of leading the charge? What skill sets do people need to either bring to it or learn new? And how are companies taking advantage of this? Well, as they say, developers are sort of the new kingmaker, right? In some ways. And so the tools that they've always said people process and technology, right? And I know as software companies get very, very excited about the technology, but it turns out that the people in the process here, the way people are building their applications, the way DevOps and CI CD, it's a very, very sort of different environment for management automation tools and sort of the relationship between teams has changed and will change more by the way. And so one of the things we're trying to do, you see this with Ansible, but you're also seeing this with advanced cluster management is the ability to delegate and give different kinds of operational and management capabilities to the teams, whether it's like business, developers, QE teams. So it's fundamentally changing the way that the processes are working. That requires that the tools map to those new team structures and there's no new processes. And that's one of the things that's going on. Fundamentally different. And one of the things I think you're going to see is management tools that were built in the past for the sort of the old style of organizing are not going to fare well in the new world where these processes and the team structures are changing. All right, so Joe, before I want to get some feedback from you on how your technologies and teams are helping with the COVID-19 piece, but let's just wrap up the ACM discussion before we do that. So you said it's a tech preview. So one of the things that's really nice is when you move things to open source, the community gets pretty good visibility as to when things are getting releases, new features down the pike. So what should we be looking for as an industry for ACM, when that rolls out, how do people start getting their hands on it? And what does that roadmap look like? So there's really two paths here. One is from a tech preview point of view, customers can get access to the technology and see it in their environment and give us feedback. The fact that it's been developed for the past two years and probably constitutes hundreds of years of developer time in it, it's not an alpha technology, it's pretty robust. So even though we're calling it tech preview, we anticipate that it's going to be production ready in short fashion. It will take us a little bit of time to open source the technologies, read it as a history of open sourcing technologies that we acquire. Each one varies in terms of what's in the code, licenses, how it's structured, how it should be open sourced. We just don't back the truck up and take a bunch of code and put it in a repository. There's actually a thoughtful process about the way that the projects are set up, which communities they should be in. So we're going through that process now, but customers will be able to take advantage of it in short fashion. And I think they're going to find a very high level of maturity given how long and how much IBM has worked on this. Yeah, Joe, really important pieces there. The other one to close the discussion with how we started off. Obviously, you know, workers and companies are having to, you know, make changes and be more flexible than ever in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. What are some of the pieces of, you know, technologies and services that you want to highlight as to that are helping companies really adjust to what is happening in today's world? Well, Red Hat has always been a very conscientious company. And in my particular area, one of the things we're doing is with Ansible, we're trying to enable folks to use automation, providing free workshops and access to code and playbooks and things for different environments. If you think about the different kinds of industries right now, some are struggling with smaller workforces, work at home. Other ones are under tremendous pressure to deliver services to help keep us safe and protect us. So we are trying to provide as much as we can in terms of automation, enabling, you know, people to use free open source innovation and automation to enable work from home to do everything from creating VPNs to, you know, set their statuses and communicate between teams in this new environment to burst into public clouds in some cases because some are trying to scale because their business has now changed but it's under tremendous pressure. You see that in delivery services and things like that. So we're trying to help as much as we can. We think automation is something that can be immediately helpful and has been. Some of these other projects, you know, if somebody's doing a transformation and they're, you know, designing new applications, that doesn't much longer a burn to it, whereas automation is needed today by companies under duress. You can help them accelerate and it can actually help their new work at home environments. So we see automation helping a lot. The other thing I want to mention is that we have free capabilities like Red Hat Insights that can actually assess systems for security. The last thing you need is security breach or some other problem, why you're dealing with fighting fires or our bad actors out there. We've seen a few already. So Insights ability to look at systems and tell people what their current posture is so they can remediate them quickly, whether with our tools or some other tool they have. We're trying to do as much as we can to help our customers through this really tough time. All right, well, Joe, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations to the team on the progress and absolutely very important topics to help customers that need to react even faster than ever in today's time. All right, thanks to you. I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit on theCUBE, check out theCUBE.net, and thank you for watching.