 Welcome back to theCUBE. We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022. We're going to wrap up now. Dave Vellante, Paul Guen, we're going to introduce you to Stephanie Chan, who's our new correspondent. Stephanie, one of your first events, your very first CUBE event. So welcome. Thank you. Up from NYC. Smaller event, but intimate. You got a chance to meet some folks last night at some of the after parties. What are your overall impressions? What did you learn this week? So this has been my first in-person event in over two years. And even though, like you said, it's on a smaller scale, roughly around 1,000 attendees versus as usual, eight to 10,000 attendees, there's so much energy and excitement and openness in these events and sessions. Even before and after the sessions, people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out. So I think a lot of people appreciate these in-person events and are really excited to be here. So you also sat in some of the keynotes, right? Pretty technical, right? Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right? I mean, I know you've got a financial background, but so what'd you think of the keynotes? What'd you think of the format, the theater and the round? Any impressions of that? So I think there's three things that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes. There's always a history lesson. There's always emphasis on the culture of openness and there's also inspirational stories about how people utilize open source. And I found a lot of those examples really compelling and interesting. For instance, people use open source in ESG and even in space. So I really enjoyed learning about all these different people and stories. What about you guys? What do you think were the big takeaways and the best stories that came out of the keynotes? Paul, you want to start? Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout. They do that only about every three years. So that's a big deal to this audience. I think what they did in the area of security with rolling out Sigstore, which is a major new, I think an important new project that was sort of incubated at Red Hat and they're trying to put in to create an open source ecosystem around that now. And the alliances, I'm usually not that much on partnerships, but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships do seem to be significant to the company. And finally, the GM partnership, which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell that they sort of rushed in at the last minute, but I think has the biggest potential impact on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem is that that is really going to anchor their edge architecture going forward. So I didn't see it so much on the product front, but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings and partnering with more companies and seeing itself as really the center of an ecosystem indicates that they are, they're in a very solid position in their business. Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us into this new normal, right? So customer demand is changing, there has been the shift to remote. There's always going to be a new normal according to Paul and open source carries us through that. So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio through this new normal and the shift? I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux, I mean, that's where it all started. You think of OpenShift, which is the application development platforms. Linux is the OS. OpenShift is the application development platform for Kubernetes. And then of course Ansible is the automation framework. And I agree with you, ecosystem is really the other piece of this. So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces and extend that into the open source community. There's a lot of innovation that's going around each of those, but ecosystems are the key. We heard from Stephanie Chiris that fundamental, I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers and those partnerships. And then the other thing that's notable here is, you know, this was, I mean, IBM was just another brand, right? I mean, if anything, it was probably a sub-brand. I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM. You certainly had no IBM presence even though they're right across the street running think, no Arvin present, no keynote from Arvin, no, you know, big blue washing. And so I think that's a testament to Arvin himself. We heard that from Paul Cormier. He said, hey, this guy's been great. He's left us alone. And he's allowed us to continue innovating. It's good news. IBM has not polluted Red Hat. Yes, I think that the Red Hat, as I said at the opening, I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging of the dog right now and their position seems very solid in the market. Clearly the market has come to them in terms of their evangelism of open source. They've remained true to their business model. And I think that gives them credibility that a lot of the other open source companies have lacked. They have stuck with the plan for over 20 years now and have really not changed it. And it's paying off. I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust to do business with. I want to throw in something else here. I thought the conversation with IDC analyst Jim Mercer was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers and they wanted to get the security from their platform vendor versus having to buy these bespoke tools. And that makes a lot of sense to me. I don't think that's going to happen, right? Because you're going to have an identity specialist. You're going to have an endpoint specialist. You're going to have a threat detection specialist. And they're going to be best of breed. Red Hat's never going to be all of those things. What they can do is partner with those companies through APIs, through open source integrations. They can add them in as part of the ecosystem. And maybe be the steward of that. Maybe that's the answer. They're never going to be the best at all those different security disciplines. There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen. But they could be the integration point. And that would be a simplifying layer to the equation. I think it's smart. They're not pretending to be an identity and access management or an anti-malware company or even a zero trust company. They are sticking to their knitting, which is operating system and developers, evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing. And that's what they're going to do. You have to admire this company. It has never gotten outside of its swim lane. I think it's understood well really what it wants to be good at. And, you know, in the software business, knowing what not to do is more important than knowing what to do. Is companies that fail are usually the ones that get overextended. This company has never overextended itself. What else do you want to know? And a term like head popping up was multi-cloud or otherwise known as meta-cloud. We know what the cloud is, but... Or super cloud. Meta-cloud. Yeah, here we go. We know what the cloud is, but what does meta-cloud mean to you guys and why has it been so popular in these conversations? I'm going to boot this today because he's the expert on this. Oh, expert or not. But I mean, again, we've coined this term super cloud and the idea behind the super cloud or what Ashesh called meta-cloud, I like his name because it allows web 3.0 to come into the equation. But the idea is that you instead of building on each individual cloud and have compatibility with that cloud, you build a layer across cloud. So you do the hard work as a platform supplier to hide the underlying primitives and APIs from the end customer or the end developer. They can then add value on top of that and that abstraction layer spans on-prem clouds across clouds ultimately out to the edge. And it's a new value layer that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure or existing data center infrastructure or emerging edge infrastructure. And the reason why that is important is because it's so damn complicated. Number one, number two, every company is becoming a software company, a technology company. They're bringing their services through digital transformation to their customers and you got to have a cloud to do that. You're not going to build your own data center. That's like Charles Wang says, not Charles Wang. Charles Phillips, we were just talking about CA. Charles Phillips, friends don't let friends build data centers. So that super cloud concept or what Shesh calls meta cloud is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems and platform companies. And I think it's real. I think it's seeing it built up. OpenShift is a great key card for them or leverage for them because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform. And you can see here, they're really doubling down on adding features to OpenShift, security features, scalability. And they see it as potentially this meta cloud, this super cloud abstraction layer. And what we've said is in order to have a super cloud you got to have a super Paz layer and that's OpenShift is that super Paz layer. So you had conversations with a lot of people within the past two days. Some people include companies from Verizon and tell Accenture, which conversation stood out to you the most? Which I'm sorry. Which conversations stood out to you the most? A conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting because we talked about culture and really he has a lot of credibility in that area because he's not a red hat, you know. He hasn't been a red hat forever. He's fairly new to the company and got a sense from him that the culture there really is what they say it is. It's a culture of openness and that's as important as technology for a company's success. I mean, this was really good content. I mean, there were a lot. I mean, Stephanie's awesome. Stephanie Chair is talking about the ecosystem. Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff. Ashash who coined meta cloud, I love that. The whole in vehicle operating system conversation was great. The security discussion that we just had. You know, the conversations with Accenture were super thoughtful. Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight. I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview for sure. And you know, I think that the customer conversations are great. Red Hat did a really good job of carrying the keynote conversations which were abbreviated this year to theCUBE. I give them a lot of kudos for that. And because theCUBE, it allows us to double click, go deeper, peel the onion a little bit, you know, all the buzzwords and cliches. But it's true. You get to clarify some of the things you heard, which were, you know, the keynotes were scripted but tight. And so we had some good follow up questions. I thought it was super useful. I don't know if I'm leaving somebody out. We're also to interview representatives from Intel and NVIDIA, which at a software conference, you don't typically do. I mean, there's the assimilation or the combination of hardware and software. It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote, that Red Hat sees hardware as matter. It matters. It's important again that it's going to be a source of innovation in the future. That came through clearly. Yeah. The hardware matters theme, you know, in the old days, you would have an operating system and the hardware were intrinsically linked. MBS in the main frame, Vax VMS in the digital minicomputers. DG had its own operating system, Wang had his own operating system, Prime with Prime OS. You remember these days? Oh my God. Right? And then of course Microsoft. And then X86, everything got abstracted. Everything became X86 and now it's all atomizing. Although, although Wintel, right? I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked for many, many years with Intel X86. And it wasn't until, you know, well, and then Sun Solaris, but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart. And the internet is built on the LAMP stack. And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation for Red Hat. So my point is that the operating system and the hardware have always been very closely tied together. Whether it's security or IO or registries, memory management, everything, controlled by the OS, so very close to the hardware. And so that's why I think you've got an affinity in Red Hat to hardware. But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think? Yes, but it still has to understand the underlying hardware. You heard today taking advantage of NVIDIA and the AI capabilities. You're seeing that with ARM, you're seeing that with Intel. How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage of new generations of CPU and NPU and CPU and PPU, XPU, right across the board. Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed this conference and it really stressed how important open source is to a lot of different industries. Great, well thanks for coming on. Paul, thank you. Great co-hosting with you. And thank you for watching theCUBE. We'll be on the road next week. We're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain. We're at Veeamon. We got a ton of stuff going on. Check out thecube.net. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Wikibon.com, we publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series. Thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin and Stephanie Chan. Thanks to the crew. Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonia, amazing job, Sonia, Steven. Thanks you guys for coming out here. Mark, good job, corresponding. Go to Siliconangle, Mark's written some great stuff. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time.