 Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia for AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat's annual event with their customers, their community. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. It's Stu Miniman, my co-host. Our next guest is Jason Smith, Vice President of North America Services for Red Hat. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, thanks for having me. So obviously the services wrapped around this are a huge opportunity because of the impact that the automation's having. Automated the tasks, people's jobs shift to other things. They can do more things. The service is opportunities big. Can you just take us through kind of your strategy of how you look at Ansible in context of the Red Hat portfolio? Sure, yeah, so from a services perspective, we're really responsible for ensuring customer success and successful adoption of all of our technologies so across the entire portfolio. And so as opposed to a services company that's focused on services, we're really focused on driving customer success and making sure that customers are successful. So overall from a services perspective, we have obviously our consulting, which is really focused on working with customers, implement solutions around Red Hat technologies, expanding the use of Red Hat technologies. We have our training business, which is our education and certification business, which has on-sites open enrollment, but also over the last couple years, we've released our Red Hat learning subscription, which is basically gives customers access to the entire portfolio of training on demand in a self-paced way, which has been a really fast growing part of our business. And then I think we've talked to you a little bit about this before, which is our open innovation labs, which is really focused on people in process and helping customers go through that digital transformation type of journey and focus around culture and things like that. It's interesting, you look at the interviews we've had yesterday with some of your customers, it's interesting, you have a couple different profiles. You have the man, we nailed it, now I got to bring this across the entire organization, you get a champion, driving change, other groups are standardized with that substrate for Ansible, others are like, wow, I have other stuff, I need to really figure this out. Take us through how you guys would approach those use cases because they're different, but all would want more services, some to accelerate either, say, a champion, some to get a new prospect on board. Right, so, we've played out, we released this about 90 days ago, which is called our automation adoption journey, and this is a five phase approach where we've worked with customers, hundreds of customers around the world in every phase of adoption of automation, obviously specifically around Ansible, and this really looks at helping customers go from more of a tactical strategy, typically is what we're saying today. A lot of customers have Ansible in different pockets doing a lot of tactical things that are driving a lot of value, but how do you take that and then really get to a more of an enterprise strategy? So, that's really what we've focused on, taking what we've learned with customers at all of those phases and really taking those best practices and coming up with a standardized approach that we can really work with customers to be able to get through that journey with them. So, Jason, can you bring us inside the customer base a little here? What we hear is it's really easy to get started, but when you lay out those five steps, is everybody looking to get to stage five, is that a year journey, are some people okay just being at phase two or three? Help us understand a little bit kind of, and we know it varies greatly, but some of the characteristics as to how fast they move along, where the end journey is for most organizations. Right, so as I mentioned, customers are coming in. Some have been early adopters of Ansible for a long time, so we've been working at more of a departmental level with customers where they're driving value at that departmental level. Others are kind of coming to us for the first time saying, we're hearing all about this automation stuff, we know we need it, but we need to get started. And so, we're really looking at kind of starting out, we typically start with a discovery session, and so we're bringing in our architects and consultants to come in and meet with their business and technical stakeholders to really understand where they are in that journey, and really define kind of their goals and objectives. So every customer is different, so really understanding what their goals and priorities are, and then being able to help kind of craft that roadmap with them to get through that journey. But I'd say most of our customers are looking to figure out how to take it from kind of more of those tactical implementations to how do we leverage that in a more scalable, consistent way, and be able to manage it more across the enterprise. Well, and it's a trick, because software development often is different at different parts in an organization. If you look at kind of the DevOps movement, it's trying to get a little bit of consistency across those, and it sounds like Ansible plays well to help get collaboration and those playbooks that can be used across and know that I have something that is supported and works, and my organization buys into it. Exactly, so a lot of customers are doing great things in those pockets, but like you said, how do you take those and not reinvent the wheel every time, but take them and kind of break them down into consumable chunks, kind of validate those, and then publish them so you have a standard set of playbooks that people can use and reuse versus developing them again for the first time, because we know that Ansible, you can do things quickly, but you don't want to redo them 10 different ways to do the same thing, so having that kind of blessed standardized way, and then publishing them out and managing them is really important. Great feedback from customers on that too. Yeah, and then they get more playbooks, they get more playbooks, and they got to manage that. But one of the interesting things we talked about yesterday with Stephanie Chiris on the REL side was connecting Ansible to REL. The insights was, the analytics certainly compelling. A lot of benefits there coming into the rest of Red Hat, and well, where is that opportunity, how are you guys servicing those pieces? Yeah, so we're really looking at Ansible to be part of most of the Red Hat portfolio, so as we're working with customers and they're adopting more and more of the Red Hat technologies, Ansible becomes a bigger part of that, so whether it's kind of bringing in our training to help train and enable customer associates on using Ansible, not only for automation, but whether you're a REL admin or OpenShift, or no matter what kind of products you're using, being able to have the training and enablement and services around that to help everyone learn to understand how to use Ansible and leverage Ansible across any area of the platform. You guys aren't new to platforms. Ansible has been a great product. Now, the platform approach, any things you guys are going to do differently, or it's going to be the same Red Hat playbook dealing with other platforms like OpenShift and other things you guys have been successful with, similar playbook for you guys, or is there a nuance with the platform with Ansible Automation, or is it business as usual? Yeah, so from a services perspective, we've tried to really standardize on a set of offerings and leverage kind of a consistent approach, whether it's with OpenShift for helping customers adopt containers or helping customers build a hybrid cloud, or we've even got an adoption journey around Vertelcos to leverage to create an NFV architecture. It's the same kind of process and framework. So we try to build a standardized process and no matter kind of what type of solution customers are building, we look to follow those types of... Just change this nice glue layer, kind of fits everywhere. On a personal question for you, what's the show been like here for you? Share with the people watching who aren't here, why is this year important? This seems to be an inflection point for Ansible Fest, the vibe, the number of attendees, the moment in history, the cloud journey, the on-premises, what's your take on this, what's your personal view on this? It's been great, I mean, I think just the size. Talking to a lot of people that have been coming here for many, many years, even prior to the Red Hat acquisition of Ansible, this is really a community-driven event and it's still set up like a community-driven event. You won't see a big Red Hat stuff everywhere. It's really kind of by the community, for the community. And just to see the sheer size of the number of attendees here and really kind of the evolution of what customers are being able to talk about on stage with the value they're getting out of Ansible is pretty tremendous. So just seeing the pure return on investment of leveraging Ansible and looking at all the large customers that are here speaking, even on the panel last night was really incredible to see them talk about their journeys over the last couple of years, going from just starting to be work with Ansible to really kind of driving that across the enterprise and getting continual value. They're vocal on feedback, but they're also vocal on success. They have all these building in champions inside the customer base. And they're all very, very excited about it. So when you have excited customers, it's a lot of fun. So Jason, I wonder if you could help us connect the dots with how automation ties into the other journeys customers are going through, the digital transformation, modernizing their applications, changing their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. What's the role of automation to enable that and participate in those journeys? Yeah, so Ansible really has kind of a part in all of those journeys. So we work with lots of large customers that are going through kind of different parts of those different journeys, and it seems like Ansible becomes a part of it. And so for instance, one of our customers that we're working with right now through a large digital transformation kind of across the entire enterprise from a both people process and technology perspective. And this is leveraging things like OpenShift and modernizing all of their applications and breaking down things into microservices and really transforming their business. But part of that is leveraging Ansible. And so one of the CTO's models was if we do something more than twice, we're going to automate it. And so I hear that kind of over and over again, no matter what type of customer we're working with, no matter what type of kind of solution we're implementing, they're coming up with these mantras that they get really excited about around automation. So we're not going to do things the old way. With these new projects, we want to automate everything and they're just seeing a ton of value and efficiency out of it. Awesome. What's the biggest surprise that you've seen over the past year on the services side and just in terms of enterprise readiness, enterprise appetite, adoption, any observations you could share around what's going on with automation? Obviously, observability, a big part of the business we're seeing that too. Automation, observability, two hot new sectors just exploding in opportunity. Yeah, I think just continuing to see this kind of digital transformation effort across so many different customers. And again, everybody's really focused on not only the technology, I mean the technology, especially things like OpenShift and Ansible and RHEL, they're enabling all of this change and all of this movement to the cloud and the automation. But really working with customers to focus on the people in process so they can leverage those capabilities because just adopting the platforms doesn't give you all of the benefits without changing your people in process. So we spent a lot of time talking about really around the culture and customers are looking at us saying, Red Hat Services don't just come in with the technical experts, but help us really understand how do we transform our people in process along the way to really take advantage of the innovation that's going around right now with the cloud. All right, so Jason, IBM's acquisition of Red Hat been very clear keeping the brand, the products, the people of Red Hat. IBM knows a thing or two about services though. We think that services really are the main focus that will happen there. So it gives a little insight as to how the scale of IBM will increase what Red Hat Services is able to be able to do. Yeah, so it's great for Red Hat, right? Because we now have a company the size of IBM out driving the adoption of our technology. So everything that we were able to do to date from a Red Hat perspective got us to one level of scale, but IBM's gonna take us to that next level of scale. And from a services perspective, IBM already has services departments around all of their different technologies. And so we really are gonna be treated kind of as a service department. So we're gonna continue to be the experts around Red Hat technologies. But it really doesn't change that much for us because we worked with large SIs since the time we started here. And we're always part of a lot of large SI implementations. So although IBM will be a very important partner of ours, they won't be the only partner. We'll still work with all of the large SIs. Take your playbook and apply it to IBM. That's right, and so we worked with IBM before the acquisition as a partner. We'll work with them after the acquisition. But IBM, what will change is on the IBM side. They will be building much larger delivery organizations around Red Hat technologies, which will allow us to kind of get the customer started on that journey. But when they look to really scale out and then IBM can take in and kind of take that to the next level that we would never have the scale to be able to get to that side. So it's good for us, it's good for our customers, and it's good for Red Hat driving adoption. And Jim pointed this out on many times on multiple calls around the broad portfolio you guys have at IBM. They have some more broad portfolio. Jason, thanks for coming on, sharing your insights. Thank you. What's new for you? Take a quick minute to plug in what's going on in your organization and what you're up to. Yeah, so we're just continuing to scale. So the good news is IBM has a large services organization, but that also drives a lot of demand for us. So we're continuing to scale, we're continuing to improve our offerings, we're continuing to help our customers reach those goals, move into the cloud, and everything they're looking to try to accomplish. Great, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. It's theCUBE coverage here at Ansible Fest. I'm John Furrier, student minister. Stay with us for more day two live coverage after this short break.