 Well, welcome here to theCUBE's coverage, continuing coverage of AnsibleFest 2021. It's a pleasure to have you with us today and also to join us today is Stephen Elliott, who is the Group Vice President of Management Software and DevOps at IDC. It's Stephen, good to see you today. Thanks for being here on theCUBE. Hey, thanks, John. It's great to be here. You bet, good. No, thank you again for the time. Well, let's just jump right in. I know this is right in your sweet spot. You know, talk about IT automation. You've done a lot of research on this. Let's just talk about overall, if you will, give us that 30 foot perspective of what you're seeing in terms of your research when we talk about IT automation these days and configuration management. Yeah, no, I mean, it's been fascinating to watch with COVID, the acceleration of the investments in automation across the board. And really our enterprise IT inquiry that we've taken, it really is just fascinating to see whether it's network automation, looking at self-service configuration, looking at provisioning, looking at a patch. I mean, you name the manual toil that enterprise IT organizations are looking to automate and we're just finding tremendous investment themes across those areas. I think on top of that, there's been a lot of acceleration of this idea of DevOps, of driving automation across development and operations teams. And then certainly realizing that it's really hard to hire great people. And so we're seeing that companies are utilizing automation as a way to drive career development, training across teams. And then certainly as a way to augment their teams to help these teams scale when they have difficulties hiring more and more staff. Yeah, well, let's take that first one or that last point first here. I think that's certainly a valuable point. And that we've heard a lot about labor all over in all sectors, right? About finding the right talent for the task. So in terms of this process, IT automation, and you're talking about maybe some companies being so much shorthanded or trying to fine-tune their labor needs, whatever. Tell me a little bit more about that in terms of automation and how this helps that process rather than hinders it. Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes when IT executives talk about automation, they talk about staff replacement. And that's really for the lean forward companies, for most companies that make these investments. That's not the case at all. It's actually an augmentation strategy where they realize, look, it's really hard to find great talent. We have an opportunity to take the talent we have, apply new skills, look at automation as a way to get existing teams more productive, as well as an opportunity to learn new skills across teams. Whether it's development, operations, site reliability, engineering, IT ops, et cetera, networking. We're seeing organizations have a much more impactful opportunity to do staff development. And so this helps with scale. It also just helps give organizations the opportunity to move people across teams, particularly if you've decided that there's one type of automation that you wanna utilize, one type of configuration language. It makes things very interesting when you have an operations person who might wanna become a site reliability engineer, or a DevOps team that understands they have to utilize automation. Maybe they wanna utilize a common framework for that. So we're seeing executives really look at this and says this isn't about staff replacement at all. It's actually quite the opposite. It's about retention. It's about career training and development. It's about being able to share staff across teams. And then certainly, this whole notion of augmentation and increasing productivity. A lot of organizations realize that with these generally net new models, containers, microservices, public cloud, DevOps, software defined infrastructure, agile, all these different organizational constructs and types of technology architectures are driving up complexity. So the ability to simplify that through automation, the ability to drive higher returns on investment through automated processes and workflows, it's really striking a chord with executive teams. And this is obviously, I think this part of this natural trend, right? As the complexity of the networks and operations has increased, finding efficiencies through automation, that's just kind of this natural flow. Has it been, or how has it been pandemic driven to a certain respect? And you touched on that earlier with your first comments, but what have you seen or say over the past year and how companies have been reacting to that environment into their business operations? Yeah, I know it's been interesting from the C-suite down particularly where CEOs have really started to realize that often their business architecture is in fact their technology architecture. And the pandemic has forced the C-suite to change their customer engagement models more often than not. So many B2B companies now had to become B2C. And so many companies had to pull back or scale back their operations in the case of hotel lodging airlines where they really had to realize, wow, we've got to figure out something because we're not going to fill capacity. So you had a lot of CEOs and CIOs recognize that their technology architecture in fact can help make these adjustments. And part of that is driving automated work streams, whether it's through new digital services, whether it's through faster provisioning of infrastructure for their DevOps and development application teams, whether it's driving higher levels of system reliability, which as we all know, customers are pretty impatient. So if digital services aren't working, you're going to move on to something else pretty quickly and give a competitor revenue opportunity. So I think a lot of those tailwinds, I should say have really struck a chord in the C-suite and it's really driven investments that are driving core modernization, application modernization, customer engagement models and business models that weren't around 24 months ago. We're finding that the focus on reliability of systems across the applications to involve systems and networks that are public private are really having that transparency. These things are the foundation. You think about building a house, these are foundational capabilities that from an operations perspective, from a development perspective, have really helped shape a lot of the thinking and investment themes that the C-suite now, because COVID accelerated a lot of these modernization projects, have really driven positive outcomes for it. When you talk about impatience, there's also kind of a, I guess a queasiness you might say or some anxiety about any kind of change. And as you're talking about these automated processes and bringing the whole new realm of opportunity into the business, this also introduces maybe some angst, I would think a little bit. Well, what are you telling and what do you see in clients and what kind of advice are you giving them in terms of their IAT automation decisions and about deploying these really massive changes in some respects to how they conduct their business? Yeah, no, it's a great question. We get that quite often. What we advise are a couple of starting points, first and foremost, most organizations are automating something somewhere. And particularly with DevOps teams, development, SRVs, operations, infrastructure platform teams, networking teams, these teams have a lot of opportunity to automate their toil. And so you have to start somewhere. So pick a use case that you know you can win, you can get great benefits and a high return on that investment. And as you sort of go through that at the team or departmental level, start then to think about what are additional processes across your peer group? Maybe you're in networking, you should be talking to operations, maybe an ops talking to DevOps teams and development, et cetera. And really start to highlight some additional ways that you can utilize that singular platform and reach across your peer groups to drive more integrated, more automated processes. And these are types of use cases that run the gamut. So from a development standpoint, these would be application release. It would look at CICD, pipeline deployments, et cetera. Of course, moving from manual automated testing is a hot button issue. But from an operational perspective, many of those processes interlock with provisioning, with security mechanisms and processes. And then of course, the involvement of the network in terms of configuration, which is a cross issue. So things like configuration, provisioning, self-service, the interlock of security mechanisms, a lot of these are pretty common themes, regardless of the team and regardless of the outcome that's required. So I think first and foremost, start small but think big. Secondly, think about a potential platform play as it relates to automation. The third piece is make sure you get the right peer groups involved in the key stakeholders. This isn't something that you just flip the switch and boom, you're successful. This will take a little bit of time and it's impactful in terms of the team, impactful in terms of the processes and of course, the technology. So having a strong leader and a set of key stakeholders who can drive this to fruition can really not only get great wins from the business perspective, but also really drive a continuous improvement model and drive that theme of automation, particularly as it relates to agile and DevOps and site reliability engineering. It can really play an important role in helping scale out those successes that many of those teams have already sort of built. So it's an extension of the investment, but at the same time, it just makes for a continual cycle of improvement opportunities for these teams to drive further automation across their particular processes. Well, this is obviously based on a lot of the AnsibleFest coverage. I talked about that on the outside of the interview. So let's just focus on Red Hat for a little bit here. First off, give me your take, give me your two cents on Red Hat in terms of how they're doing. And obviously some big announcements, Portworx and then some on the Ansible platform. So first off, give me a little idea on Red Hat and then let's drill down to the news they're making with their announcements. Sure. Yeah, it's interesting. Red Hat Ansible is continuous to do very well in the marketplace, both from an adoption perspective, as well as just continuing to get more net new logos. In addition to that, post the Red Hat IBM acquisition, IBM continues to take advantage of Ansible across its portfolio. So we're seeing further reach into the market into accounts that are both IBM and Red Hat related. I think another piece too, we've recently did some work around business value of Red Hat Ansible automation platform. And a lot of those customers really talked to us about this notion of starting small, but also thinking more broadly across what type of returns they could get from the platform as well as, it's not just about cost reduction, right? It's really about cost containment. It's about acceleration of pipelines. It's about driving higher levels of system reliability. So the other thing we found our customers are really recognizing it's a balance of business and technical metrics that they'll want to sort of choose to drive and measure their success. But also at the same point, it's a recognition on the part of Red Hat and their product and development teams that they've really listened to a lot of customers, gotten features in and really started to think about this breadth of how automation can support, not just operations, but development. This idea of autonomous automation, being able to empower different sets of personas or customers to drive faith and trust in a product to say, hey, we want to automate a particular piece of a process. And we're just going to build up the policy, inherently use the templates and boom, turn it on and set it and forget it. So that's a coming wave where customers are starting to work with Red Hat and particularly the Ansible platform to understand what does that mean? How do we execute that? And then as we get more comfortable with turning on that more autonomous perspective, how can we then spread that idea out to different teams? So we're seeing a lot of these themes and as we talk to customers, hearing a lot of good feedback with regards to Red Hat and IBM taking advantage of the technology, as well as more importantly, customers getting significant value and returns from the platform itself. All right. Well, Steven, I appreciate the insights. Certainly it's an interesting future awaiting course the world of IT automation, a lot more intelligence, right? A lot more autonomy, a lot more challenges, but I'm sure Red Hat is very much up to that. And thank you for being with us here today on theCUBE. Hey, thank you, John. It was great to be here. You bet. Steven Elliott joining us from IDC, talking about Red Hat and Ansible and we'll continue with more coverage a little bit later on theCUBE. Thanks for joining this segment with Steven Elliott.