 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 2020. Of course, digital event this year, we are not together at Moscone, but we are bringing together many of the speakers, thought leaders, customers in this very important ecosystem. Really excited to welcome back to our program, Stephanie Cheris, who's the vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business unit inside of Red Hat. Stephanie, so great to see you. Have to give you a virtual hug and high five here, but always great to see you and have you on the program. Oh, thank you, Stu. It's great to be here. And this is what together means today, but it's great to be together with you again here at Summit. Yeah, the discussion is you talk kind of together apart for a time. We talk in tech that change is one of the only constants that we have and there are more changes than ever happening right now. So before we get into kind of your BU, talk a little bit about some of the big changes. There's organizational changes. I know we spoke to you in 2019 at IBM Think and Red Hat Summit because you've worked for both sides of the equation here. Give us kind of the latest from your standpoint. Yeah, certainly the leadership changes which have been public now for a couple of weeks, those are a big change for us. I think one of the things that has come through is IBM has really been respecting what Red Hat is, what we do, but also how we do it is very important and valued. And we at Red Hat believe in it so strongly, we're sticking to what Red Hat does best. Everything is open source, everything is collaborative. And honestly, I have to say it feels great as a Red Hatter to see Jim in the position he's in at IBM. Paul's passion, which clearly comes across in his key notes and his passion for how we have an open source development model, it's great to have him now take over the CEO role for Red Hat. So it's really exciting times. I think last year when we spoke, it was a bit of a wait and see and see what happens. And I think now the recent announcements really solidify the sort of synergy and partnership that IBM and Red Hat have and what our intentions are in the market. But at Red Hat, we still stay Red Hat and we're still driving things the way we always have. And that's great, feels good. That's great. And thank you so much for the updates. So when we talk about your business unit, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course, REL, I've got a little too much history. I go back to when it was Raz before REL and kind of watched the growth of Linux to become really the underlying fabric of so much of what we see out there today for all of businesses, so many companies that could not exist if it wasn't for Linux. And in the seven years we've been having the cube, of course, we've really watched that move from Linux to not only be some of the foundations of what's happening in customers' environments, but also a major piece of cloud and cloud native. So give us that update as to here in 2020, why Linux has been around for quite a long time, but it still is relevant at that point. Yeah, so that's a great lead and ties exactly to how we look at REL in the Red Hat sort of entire portfolio. When you look at Linux and how it evolved, it started out as being a bit of a cheaper alternative to Unix, but it quickly became, because of the open source way and collaborative way it's developed, it quickly became sort of this springboard for innovation because you have all these incredible innovators collaborating upstream, all of that has fed to a whole different view of what Linux is. Cloud exists because of Linux, containers are just a different deployment mechanism for Linux workloads, artificial intelligence, those apps are built on Linux. So it's become this standardized foundation upon which innovation is done today. And for me, that's the most exciting thing because at Red Hat and in REL, our goal is to, one, have it just work, right? It has to be the standard. And while sometimes that can be misinterpreted as boring or a commodity, it is anything but a commodity. It's probably one of the most strategic decisions that someone makes is which REL distribution, which Linux distribution do they use? And at REL, we take real pride that it's built for the enterprise. It's built for security, it's built for resiliency and all of that, build it once, deploy it anywhere, translates into also using all the innovation, all the containerization capabilities, using it across multiple public clouds. So it's really that combination of having it just work, be the foundation of where you build once and then being able to leverage all the innovation that's coming out of the open source world today. Yeah, really interesting points, Stephanie. I think back to when we talked for years about the consumerization, excuse me, of IT and people thought that therefore there wouldn't be differentiation. You know, just buy white box things and everything will be off the shelf. But if you look at how most companies build things, they really hyper-optimize them. I need to build what I need, I need to use the tools that are available and I need to be able to be agile. Well, you know, one of my highlights last year, talking to a lot of companies going through their digital transformation and a number of them at Red Hat Summit last year where they talked about both the organization and technology changes that they're making to move faster and of course, your portfolio is a big piece of helping them move forward. And that's one thing we're seeing, that ability to consume innovation and get the most and extract the most out of what they're running today in their data center as customers transform and take on this digital transformation. It's not just a technology statement. In most cases, it's an organizational statement as well and how do you bridge both those and move it forward? It's one thing we focus a lot on, right? With our open innovation labs with a lot of customers as well because it's not just about the technology, it's about the way we work and the way we do things as well. So Stephanie, every year or so I hear, it's like, oh, well, we've got a new way to do the operating system. There was the just enough operating system for a while when containerization came out. There was a little company named CoreOS that was like, oh, we're going to make a thin version. Of course, CoreOS is now a piece of Red Hat. So still with the cloud, there's always, we're going to change the way the operating system is done. We just love your viewpoint Red Hat has a few options and kind of a spectrum of offerings, but how do your customers think about the OS these days and how should we be thinking about rel specifically in that overall spectrum? No, so that's a great question, Stu. And we look at it as Linux and rel is the one thing that stays the same and helps you get the value out of all the work you've already put in, all the development work you've already put in and make sure that that translates to the future where everything is changing, how you deploy, where you deploy, what you deploy, all of that may change. But if you want to get the value out of the work and the development that has been done yesterday, you need something to stay the same. And in our view, that's rel. We build it with in mind for the enterprise, along life cycle, security support. We build all of that into it so that when you build on a rel kernel, you can take that if you want to deploy it in a container, you can deploy on rel itself, or if you need orchestration, you can deploy it on OpenShift. And that's part of the reason why you mentioned CoreOS. So we now have a rel CoreOS is within OpenShift 4.0 and beyond, of course. But what we did was we tailored down what is in rel. It's the same packages. It's the same certification, security, all of that work that we put in, right? We take the CoreOS piece of it, what's essential and really optimized for OpenShift. We build that into an immutable image and it goes out as part of OpenShift. It's not available separately because it's really tailored what we pick, the life cycle is all matching OpenShift. And what that does is provide you an OpenShift experience that's easy to update fully across the board, all the way down to the kernel, but you know it's the same Linux that you have in rel. And it's that consistency of technology that we really strive for. Same thing in public cloud. So when you build an image on prem on rel, you can take that image up into the public cloud and know it's the same level of security and it just will work. Part of my team and we take a lot of pride in the fact that it will just work. And while that may not sound super exciting, particularly in days like right now, being dependable and being reliable and knowing that it's secure, all of that is really important when you run your business that those features are anything but commoditized. Well, yeah, I think one of the real volumes that customers see with rel specifically is there's so much change going on there. And you look at the Linux community, you look at what OpenShift's doing in the Kubernetes community, there's so much code change going on, Red Hat, packages that make sure that you don't need to think about the almost chaos that's going out there in all of those communities, but you package those together. So Stephanie, rel 8 was of course, one of the highlights of last year's Red Hat Summit. So we'd love to hear if you've got any good customer stories, really the momentum of rel 8 as you've seen it, roll out around the world as, and then we'll talk about the new updates you have this week. Yeah, great. So rel 8 was a big deal for us last year, as you remember, and partly because not only all the features and functions, of course, which we put into it, but also because we really wanted to reposition what the value of an operating system is within a data center and within their innovation future. So we really focused all the features and functions into two buckets. One is about how do we help you with the operating system, run your business better, more efficiently, get the most out of the systems you have in the critical workloads that you run today? And how do we use the operating system to help you bridge into the next level of innovation? What's coming down the pipeline, things like containers? And we really wanted to make sure that as we see, most customers are looking to how they digitally transform, but of course no one has the freedom to throw away everything they've done in the past. They want to build upon that and get value out of it. So we really focused on balancing those two things. Now as we look at, in fact, one of the commitments we made because we heard it from customers was they wanted a more predictable deployment of our minor releases and our major releases. And we committed at the RHEL 8 launch that we would be delivering minor releases every six months and major releases every three years. And we have held to that. We delivered 8-1 six months after we delivered 8 and now you saw last week, we delivered 8.2. This is what it means for us to stand by our word and be dependable as an operating system. And the beauty of the subscription with RHEL is that if you're a customer and you're running RHEL 7, particularly in times right now, it's not that easy to get into your data center perhaps. And so if you don't choose to update to 8 now, you can stay on 7 until that time works. That's, to me, that's part of the beauty and the flexibility of the subscription model. We of course want to continue to bring you new capabilities and new features. But the subscription, our goal is to have a value subscription that you can get the most value from, no matter when you decide to upgrade or move forward with the different releases that we have. Yeah, well, yeah, congratulations on keeping. The release is going on schedule. It's one of the nice things about open source is we can see the roadmap out there. You've made this promise and you're keeping to it. So as you said, the announcement's been made, it's been talked about in the keynote. So give us a couple of the highlights as to what people should be looking at and looking to learn more when they dig into 8.2. Yeah, great. So we really wanted to stick with a few key messages with it and they do really tie to, how do we help you run your business and how do we help you grow your business? I'd say one thing that we announced and what we pivoted to with the 8.0 is we've really moved to, how do we deliver what we called an intelligent OS, which means an OS that helps you bridge the gap and brings more value to you in your data center than you got before. One of the key aspects to this was adding in the capability of Red Hat Insights. And we added insights capability into every single rail subscription that is under current support. So whether or not you moved to rail eight, whether you had rail seven, if you have a supported version of rail six, all of those had insights added to it. And what Insights is, is a, as a service on cloud.redhat.com, you can link up your servers and it will give you insight into operational capability. Is it configured correctly? Is it, could it be optimized for better performance? Where are you on your CVE updates? And what it does is take all that knowledge that Red Hat has from all the support cases and things that we're seeing, what's happening in the industry, what we're seeing other customers have, and we can even proactively help customers. The feedback on this capability has been huge. In fact, you'll see in the announcement last week, we've added a lot of new capabilities into this specifically for that reason. We've had customers, so you know, it's like having more ops people on my team because I'm getting this input in directly from Red Hat for things to look at. And so that to me was probably one of the key aspects that as we look from going to eight into 8.2, how do we build up that capability? And of course, last week you saw, we added a lot to that. And I think now more than ever, we want to make sure that everyone who has a rail subscription is getting the most value out of that. And I think Insights is one of the places where if you have a subscription and you can value or you can get more value from operational help, Insights is a place where we want to help you. Everything we had prior, we have now bucketized into a capability in the Insights called Advisor. It's really about performance, stability and security and doing an analysis for you. We've added a new capabilities around vulnerability. How do you remediate common vulnerabilities and exposures, compliance aspect, patch aspect, policies and drift. Kind of all of those we've now bucketed in into that Insights capability. So this brings a lot more value to something that we have already seen customers say, we didn't expect to get this amount of input and continuous growth because we constantly add new rules into that engine. And so what we knew yesterday won't be what we know tomorrow. And we look forward to sharing with that with everyone who has a subscription. So this is a place where I think it's an important place for folks to look, particularly now because operational efficiency is really key and security is really key. And we have a lot of capabilities involved. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Please go ahead now. One other aspect in that that I wanted to mention was we also added a capability called subscription watch. And subscription watch helps you get a very simple clean view of all the subscriptions you have and where they're running. And that was one thing that we saw customers say there was friction in, how do I know where my entitlements are, how I'm using them across my entire enterprise and subscription watch can help with that. So this sort of cloud.redhat.com capability that we can assist with and is already part of your subscription. These are the kinds of things that we really want to help augment this to make really intelligent OS for the enterprise. Yeah, Stephanie, the comment I was going to make is there's certain shows that I go to that every year you go to it, you say, okay, it's a little bit bigger. They announced something, they made some progress on it. What has impressed me most about going to the Red Hat Show year after year is really the growth of the portfolio, if you will. So when I first started going to it, it was a lot of the people there were the hardcore Linux people. And then there's some storage people, some networking people as cloud and containers really grew. It really blossomed into this really robust ecosystem and growth there. So I would love just to get your viewpoint on the skill set because I'm sure there's plenty of companies out there that are like, well, I've got some people that are my Linux people and they might do things that aren't there, but how do you see the skill set and what Red Hat's doing really permutating more and more of companies' day-to-day activity? I think one of the things that I'm most proud of is even since last year, it's all the deeper collaborations we have between the various product lines. Certainly you'll talk with Joe Fitzgerald and he and I work together very closely on capabilities like insights. How do we add Ansible capabilities directly into RHEL? And what that does is really help, I think in any customer today, skills is probably one of the biggest concerns that they have. How do they grow those skills? How do they help folks grow and learn more and progress into the innovation areas? But clearly they still need their mission critical applications to run and how do they span that? And I think what we're really trying to do is be able to bring the strength of the portfolio together to help a customer have more flexibility in how they leverage their skills and how they grow their skills. Because I think coming back to that statement that you made earlier, it's not just about technology, it's about how if you really want to be agile, it's about how a company is organized. And I think we're hoping that we bring together the strength of the portfolio so that a customer is able to leverage their organization and leverage their skills in the best way possible. I think another place where we worked hard in 8.2 on the similar lines of bridging the portfolio was, we announced back in 8.0, we were putting containerization tools directly into RHEL with Bill DePodman and Scopio. In 8.2, we brought in the newest versions of Scopio and Buildup. In fact, in tech preview, you can get containerized versions of those. And so we're continuing to add, what we are seeing is that containerization is a journey for customers. Many customers just want to deploy a single container on a server or they want to deploy a single container in a VM. And they're not ready for orchestration. We wanted to put the tools in so that a customer could do that on RHEL, get started, get those containers deployed on RHEL, put those tools directly in. We added a tool called Utica, which is a tool built for security. It brings that security of SC Linux and brings that up and adds value at the container level. It's those kinds of things, as you see the bridge from RHEL into OpenShift, how do we help a customer bridge that skill journey as well along that path? And I think right now in Kubernetes and containers, skills is a big area of focus. So the more we can help ease that across the portfolio and bring those things together is really important. And I know we're working very closely with the Shesh and the team there in order to help bridge that. Excellent, Stephanie, I just want to give you the last word. We talked a lot about the ongoing journey that customers are going through. So give us your final takeaway as to how customers should be thinking about Red Hat in general and RHEL specifically as their journey goes forward. I think one of the things we're very proud of here at Red Hat is that we always, particularly in the open source communities with our customers, with our partners, we want to roll up our sleeves and help. And that's we want to co-develop, we want to work upstream with you. It's one of the things we're very proud of. And now particularly in this time, we want to make sure that folks understand we're here to help and we want to make sure that you're getting the most out of the subscriptions you have. And we help you on that journey both to get the most out of you can out of your data center today, but also be ready for the innovation that you want to consume going forward. And we're collectively working across Red Hat in order to make that happen. But even though this is different and it's the virtual experience edition of Red Hat Summit, it's great to be together and be able to share the whole message. Well, Stephanie, the open source community is definitely used to collaborating remotely. So thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to see you and we hope to talk again soon. Great to see you, Stu. Thank you for the time. All right, you're watching the cubes coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 digitally with remote guests from around the globe. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.