 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, Cube Virtual's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We're not face to face this year. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. We're virtual, it's theCUBE virtual. We're doing our part getting the remote interviews with all the best thought leaders, experts, and of course the Red Hat experts. We've got Walter Bentley, Senior Manager of Automation Practice with Red Hat and Jason Smith, Vice President of North American Services. Back on theCUBE, we were in Atlanta last year in person. Guys, thanks for coming on. Virtually good morning to you, thanks for coming on. Good morning, John. Good morning, good morning. So, since AnsibleFest last year, a lot's happened, we're living in seems to be an unbelievable 2020, depending on who you talk to. It's been the craziest year of all time. Fires in California, crazy presidential election, COVID, whole nine yards, but the scale of cloud has just unbelievably moved some faster. You know, I was commenting with some of your colleagues around the Snowflake IPO. It's built on Amazon, right? So value has changed, people are shifting. New modern apps are starting to get clear visibility on what these modern apps are looking like. It's cloud native, it's legacy integrations. It's kind of beyond lift and shift, as we've been saying in the business. I'd love to get, Jason, we'll start with you. Your key points, you would like people to know about AnsibleFest 2020 this year, because there's a lot going on this year. Because there's a lot to build on and there's a tailwind for cloud native and customers have to move fast. What's your thoughts? Yeah, so a lot has happened since last year and customers are looking to be a lot more selective around their automation technologies. So they're not just looking for another tool. They're really looking for an automation platform, a platform that they can leverage more of an enterprise strategy and really be able to make sure that they have something that's secure, scalable, and they can use across the enterprise to be able to bring teams together and really drive value and productivity out of their automation platform. What's the key points in the customers and our audience around the conversations, around the learning, that's the new stuff happening in using Ansible this year. What are the key top things, Jason? Can you comment on what you're seeing, the big takeaway for our audience watching? Yeah, so let's change, like you said, since last year. We worked with a lot of customers around the world to implement Ansible and automation at scale. So we're using our automation journeys as we talked about last year and really helping customers lay out a more prescriptive approach on how they're going to enter product, deliver automation across their enterprise. So customers are really working with us because we're working with the largest customers in the world to implement their strategies. And when we work with new customers, we can bring those learnings and that experience to them. So they're not having to learn that for the first time and figure it out on their own, but they're really able to learn and leverage the experience we have through hundreds of customers at enterprise scale and can take the value that we can bring in and help them through those types of projects much more quickly than they could on their own. It's interesting when you're looking at the research numbers and look at the adoption of what Ansible is doing and you guys up with Red Hat, it's pretty strong. Could you share on the services side because there's a lot of services going on here, not just network services and software services, just traditional services. What are the one or two reasons why a customer engages with Red Hat services? What would that be? Yeah, so like I said, I mean, we bring that experience. So customers that typically might have to spend weeks troubleshooting and making decisions on how they're going to deliver their implementations. They can work with us and we can bring those best practices in and allow them to make those decisions and implement those best practices within hours instead of weeks and really be able to accelerate their projects. Another thing is where a services company is part of a product company. So we're not there just to deliver services. We're really focused on the success of the customer leveraging our technologies. So we're there to really train and mentor them through the process so that they're really getting up to speed quickly. They're taking advantage of all of the expertise that we have to be able to build their own experience and expertise. So they can really take over once we're gone and be able to support and advance that technology on their own. So they're really looking to us to not only implement those technologies for them but really with them and be able to train and mentor them, like I said and take advantage of those learnings. We also help them, we don't just focus on the technologies but really look at the people in process side of things. So we're bringing in a lot of principles from DevOps and Agile and Open Practices and helping customers really transform and be able to do things in a new way to be much more efficient, a lot more Agile, be able to drive a lot more value out of our technology. Well, I got to ask you last year we were chatting about this, but I want to get the update. And I'd like you to just give us a quick refresh definition about the automation adoption journey because this is a real big deal. I mean, we're looking at the trends. Everyone realizes automation is super important at scale as you think about whether it's, you know software data, anything's about automation, it's super important, but it's hard. I mean, the marketplace, you look at, we were looking at the numbers, I was talking to IDC for you guys at this festival and at Ansible Fest and they said about five to 10% of enterprises are using or containerized, which means this huge wave coming of containerization. This is about the automation adoption journey because you start containerizing, right? You start looking at the workflows on the pipelining, how the code's being released and everything. This is important stuff. Give us the update on the automation adoption journey and where it is in the portfolio. Well, yeah, just as you kind of called it out, last year on main stage at Ansible Fest, almost every customer expressed the need and desire to have to have a strategy as to how they drive their adoption of automation inside their enterprise. And as we've gone over the past few months of putting this in place with many customers, what we've learned is that many customers have matured into a place where they're now looking at the end to end workflow. Instead of just looking at the tactical thing that they want to automate, they're actually looking at the full ribbon, the full workflow and determining are there changes that need to be made and adjusted to be more efficient when it comes to dealing with automation. And then the other piece, as we kind of alluded to already, is the contagious nature of that adoption. We're finding that there are organizations that are picking up the automation adoption journey. And because of the momentum it creates inside of that organization, we're finding other municipalities that are associated with them are now also looking to be able to take on the journey because of that contagious nature. So we can see that how it's spreading in a positive way. And we're really looking forward to being able to do more of it as the next quarter and the next year comes up. Yeah, and that whole sharing thing is big part of the content theme and the community thing. So great, great reference on that, good things word of mouth and community and collaboration is a good call out there. A quick question for you guys recently had a big win with NTT, Dokomo, and their engagement with you guys on the automation adoption journey. Walter, what were some of the key takeaways? Jaycee, you can chime in too. I'd like to get some of the specifics around where it's been successful. To me, that customer experience was one that really was really exciting, primarily because we learned very early on that they were completely embodying that open source culture. And they were very excited to jump right in and even, you know, went about creating their own community of practice. We call them communities of practice, you may know them as centers of excellence. They wanted to create that very early in increments, way before we were even ready to introduce it. And that's primarily because they saw how being able to have that community of practice in place created an environment of inclusion across the organization. They had legacy tools in place already. Actually, there was a homegrown legacy tool in place. And they very quickly realized that it didn't need to remove that tool. They just needed to figure out a way of being able to optimize and streamline how they leverage it and also be able to integrate it into the Ansible Automation platform. And so another thing I wanted to very quickly note is that they very quickly jumped onto the idea of being able to take those large workflows that they had and breaking them up into smaller chunks. And as you already know from last year when we spoke about it, that's a pivotal part of what the Automation and Adoption Journey brings to organization. So to sum it all up, they were all in, they were very automation-first. Mindset is what they were driving them. And all of those personas, all of those personal and cultural behaviors are what really helped drive that engagement to be very successful. Jason, I'll get your thoughts on this because again, Walter brought up last year's reference to breaking things up into modules. You look at this year's key news. It's all about collections. You're seeing content as a big focus, content being not like a blog post or a media asset, like this is content, but code is content. It's sharing, it's being consumed by other people. There's now community. You're seeing this theme of enabling. I mean, you're looking at successes like you guys are having with NTT, Docomo and others. Once people realize there's a better way and success is contagious, as Walter was saying, people, you're now enabling new ways to do things, faster at scale and all that good stuff. It's been, go check out the keynotes. You guys talk about it all day long with the execs. But I want to learn, right? So when you enable success, people want to be part of it. So I can imagine there's a thirst and demand for training and the playbooks and all the business models, innovations that's going on. What are you seeing for people that want to learn? Is there training? Is there certifications? Because once you get the magic formula, as Walter pointed out, and we all know, once people see what success looks like, they're going to want to duplicate it. So as this wave comes, it's like having the new surfboard. I want to surf that wave. So what's the update on Ansible's training, the tools, how do I learn? Is it certification of all? Just take a minute to explain what's going on. Yeah, so it's been a crazy world, as we've talked about over the last six, seven months here. And we've really had to adapt ourselves in our training and consulting offerings to be much more of, be able to support our remote delivery model. So we very, very quickly, back in the March timeframe, we're able to move our consultants to a remote workforce and really implement the tools and technologies to be able to still provide the same value to customers remotely as we have in person historically. And so it's actually been really great. We've been able to make a really seamless transition. And actually our CSAT and app promoter scores have actually gone up over the last six months or so. So I think we've done a great job being able to still offer the same consulting capabilities remotely as we have on site. And so that's obviously with a real personal touch, working hand in hand with our customers to deliver these solutions. But from a training perspective, we've actually had to do the same thing because customers are on site, they can't do in person training. We've been able to move our training offerings to completely virtual. So we're continuing to train our customers on Ansible and our other technologies through a virtual modality. And we've also been able to take all of our certifications and now offer those remotely. So whereas customers historically would have had to go on into a center and get those certifications in person, they can now do those certifications remotely. So all of our training offerings and consulting offerings are now available remotely as well as they were in person in the past and will be hopefully soon enough. But it's really- You had to adopt a virtual, you had to adopt a virtual. Excuse me? You had to adopt to the virtual model quickly for training. Exactly. What about the community role? What's the role of the community? You guys have a very strong community. Walter pointed out the sharing aspect. Well, I pointed out he talked about the contagious people are talking. You guys have a very robust community. What's the role of community in all this? Yeah, so as Walter said, we have our communities, the practice that we use internally. We work with customers to build communities of practice, which are very much like centers of excellence where people can really come together and share ideas and share best practices and be able to then leverage them more broadly. So whereas in the past, knowledge was really kept in silos, we're really helping customers to build those communities and leverage those communities to share ideas and be able to leverage the best practices that are being adopted more broadly. That's awesome. Yeah, break down those silos, of course. Open up the data. Good things will happen. A thousand flowers bloom as we always say. Walter, I want to get your thoughts on this collection that enables back up to learning and integration. So if collections are going to be more pervasive and more commonplace, the ability to integrate, we were covering for VMware World. There's a VMware module collection, I should say. What are customers doing when you integrate in cross-technology partners? Because now, obviously customers are going to have a lot of choice and options. If I'm an integration partner, you're talking about cloud native and the kinds of things we're talking about, you're going to have a lot of integration touchpoints. What's the most effective way for customers integrating other technology partners into Ansible? And this is one of the major benefits that came out of the announcement last year with the Ansible Automation Platform. The Ansible Automation Platform really enables our customers to not just be able to do automation, but also be able to connect the dots or be able to connect other tools such as other IT MSM tools, or be able to connect into other parts of their workflows. And what we're finding in breaking down really quickly is two things. Collections, obviously, is a huge aspect and not just necessarily the collections, but the automation service catalog is really where the value is. Because that's where we're placing all of these certified collections and certified content that's certified by Red Hat now that we create alongside with these vendors and they're now available to customers who are consuming the automation platform. And then the other component is the fact that we're now moved into a place, but we now have something called the Automation Hub, which is very similar to Galaxy, which is the online version of it. But the Automation Hub now is a focused area that's dedicated to a customer where they can store their content, store those collections, not just the ones that they pull down that are certified by Red Hat, but the ones that they create themselves. And the availability of this tool, not only just as a SaaS product, but now being able to have a local copy of it, which is brand new, hot off the press, hot off the truck feature is huge. That's something that customers have been asking for for a very long time, and I'm very happy that we're finally able to supply it. Okay, so back up for a second, rewind. Fell off the truck. What does that mean? It's downloadable. You're saying that the Automation Hub is available locally? Is that what you're saying? Okay, so what does that mean for the customer? What's the impact for them? So what that means is that previously customers would have to connect into the internet. And as the Automation Hub was a SaaS product, meaning it was available via the internet, you can go there, you can sync up and pull down content. And some customers prefer to have it in-house. They prefer to have it inside of their firewall within their control, not accessible through the internet. And that's just, you know, their preferences obviously for, sometimes it's for compliance or business risk reasons. And now because of that, we were able to meet that ask and be able to make a local version of it, whereas you can actually have Automation Hub locally in your environment, you can still sync up data that's out on the SaaS version of Automation Hub, but be able to bring it down locally and have it available with inside of your firewall as well as be able to add your content and collections that you create internally to it as well. So it creates a centralized place for you to store all of your automation goodness. Jason, I know you got a hard stop and I want to get to you on the IBM question. Have you guys started any joint service engages with IBM? Yeah, so we've been delivering a lot of engagements jointly through IBM. We have a lot of joint customers and they're really looking for us to bring the best of both Red Hat Services, Red Hat products and IBM all together to deliver joint solutions. We've actually also worked with IBM Google technology services to integrate Ansible into their service offerings. So they're now really leveraging the power of Ansible to drive lower cost and more innovation with our customers and our joint customers. I think that's going to be a nice lift for you guys, getting into the IBM machinery. I mean, you guys got a great offering, always had great reviews, great community. I mean, IBM's is going to be moving this pretty quickly through the system, I can imagine. What's some of the feedback so far? Yeah, it's been great. I mean, we have so many large joint customers and they're helping us to get to a lot of customers that we were never able to reach before with their scale around the world. So it's been great to be able to leverage the IBM scale with the great products and services that Red Hat offers to really be able to take that more broadly and continue to drive that across customers in an accelerated pace. Well, Jason, I know you got to go. We're going to stay with Walter while you drop off, but I want to ask you one final question for the folks watching or asynchronously coming in and out of Ansible Fest 2020 this year. What is the big takeaway that you'd like to share? What is the most important thing people should pay attention to? Well, a couple of things. There's nothing, one thing, top three things. What should people pay paying attention to this year? What's the most important stories that you should highlight? Yeah, I think there's just a lot going on. This technology is moving very quickly. So I think there's a lot of great stories. Definitely take advantage of the customer use cases and hearing how other customers are leveraging Ansible for automation and again, really looking to not use it just as a tool, but really an enterprise strategy that can really change their business and really drive costs down and increase revenues by leveraging the innovation that Ansible and automation provides. Jason, thank you for taking the time. Great insight, really appreciate the commentary. And hopefully we'll see you next year in person. That's great, head set. Walter, let's get back to you. I want to get into this use case as some of the customer feedback. Love the stories. I mean, look, we love to get the new data. We'd love to hear about the new products. But again, success is contagious. You mentioned that I want to hear the use cases. So a lot of people have their ear to the ground and look up the virtual environments. They're learning through new ways. They're looking for signals of success. So I got to ask you, what are the things that you're hearing over and over again as you guys are spinning up engagements? What are some of the patterns that are emerging that are becoming a trend in terms of what customers are consistently doing to overcome some of their challenges around automation? Absolutely. So what we're finding is that over time that customers are raising the bar on us. And what I mean by that is that their expectations out of being able to take on tools now has completely changed, specifically when we're talking around automation. Our customers are now leading with the questions of trying to find out, well, how do we reduce our operational costs with this automation tool? Are we able to increase revenue? Are we able to really, truly drive productivity and efficiency within our organization by leveraging it? And then they dovetail into, well, are we able to mitigate business risks even associated with leveraging this automation tool? So as I mentioned, customers are kind of up-leveling what their expectations are out of the automation tools. And what I feel very confident about is that with the launch of the Ansible Automation Platform, we're really able to be able to deliver and show our customers how they're able to get a return on their investment, how by taking part in looking at reworking their and workflows, how we're able to bring productivity, drive that efficiency, and by leveraging it to be able to mitigate risk, you do get the benefits that they're looking for. And so that's something that I'm very happy that we were able to rise to the occasion and so far, so good. You know, last year I was very motivated and very inspired by the Ansible vision and content product progress. Just overall vibe was good, community of the product. It's always been solid. But one of the things that's happened and I want to get your commentary and reaction to this is that, and we've been riffing on this on theCUBE and inside the community is, you know, certainly automation and no brainer, machine learning, automation. I mean, you can't go wrong. Who doesn't want automation? That's like saying, you know, I want to watch more football and have good food and you know, good wifi. I mean, it's good things, right? Automation's a good thing. So get that. But the business model issues you brought up ROI from the top of the ivory tower and these companies, certainly with COVID, we need to make money and have modern apps. And if you try to make that, sounds simple, right? X as a service, X-A-A-S, everything's as a service. That's easy to say, hey, Walter, make everything as a service. Got it, boss. Well, what the hell do you do? I mean, how do you make that happen? You got Amazon, you got multi-cloud, you got legacy apps. You're talking about going in and re-architecting the application development process. So you need automation for the business model of everything as a service. What's your reaction to that? Because it's very complicated, it's doable, people are getting there, but the nirvana is everything as a service. This is a huge conversation. I mean, it's really big, but what's your reaction to that when I bring that up? Right, and you're right. It is a huge undertaking and you would think that with the delivery of COVID into our worlds that, you know, many organizations would probably shy away from making changes. Actually, they're doing the opposite. They're running, like you mentioned, they're running towards automation and trying to figure out how do they optimize and be able to scale based on this new demand that they're having specifically new virtual demand. And we actually, I'm happy you mentioned that, we actually added something to the automation adoption journey to be able to combat or be able to solve for that change and being able to take on that large ask of everything as a service, so to speak. And increment zero at the very beginning of the automation adoption journey, we added something called navigate. And what navigate is, is it's a framework where we come in and not just evaluate what they want to automate and bring that into a new workflow, but we evaluate what they already have in place, what automation they have in place, as well as be manual tasks. And we go through and we try to figure out, how do you take that very complex, large thing and stream it down into something that can be first off determined as a service and made available for your organization to consume and as well as be able to drive that business, the business risk or be able to drive your business objectives forward. And so that exercise that we're now stepping our customers through makes a huge difference and kind of puts it all out in front of you so that you can make decisions and decide which way you want to go and taking one step at a time. Yeah, it's interesting, great insight, great comment. I think this is really where the dots are going to connect over the next few years. Everything is a service. You got to lay the foundation. But if you really want to get this done, I got to ask you the question around Ansible's ability to integrate and implement with other products. So could you give examples of how Ansible has integrated and implemented with other Red Hat products and or other types of technology vendors products? Right. So one example that always pops to the top of my head and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my managing architects who was leading this effort was the simple fact that you, when you think about a mainframe, right? So now IBM is our new family member. When you think about mainframes, you think about IBM and it just so happens that there's a huge ask and demand and push around being able to automate ZOS mainframe. And IBM had already embarked on the path of determining, well, can this be done with Ansible? And as I mentioned before, my managing architect kind of partnered up with the folks on IBM side so that we're bringing in Red Hat consulting and now we have IBM and we're working together to move that idea forward of saying, hey, you can automate things with the mainframe. So think about it. We're in 2020 now in the midst of a new normal and now we're thinking about and talking about automating mainframes. So that just shows how things have evolved in such a great way. And I think that that story is a very interesting one. You know, it's so funny the evolution. I'm old enough to remember, I came out of college in the 80s and I would look at the old mainframe guys and they're like, you guys are going to be dinosaurs. You know, they're still around. I mean, some of the banking apps, you can't, I mean, some of them are not multi-threaded and all the good stuff, but they are powering. They are managing a workload. But this is the beautiful thing about cloud and some of the cloud activities is that you can essentially integrate. You don't have to replace the old to bring in the new. This has been a common pattern. This is where, you know, containers, microservices and cloud has been a dream state because you can essentially re-layer and glue it together. This is a big deal. What's your reaction to that? No, it's a huge deal. And the reality is, is that we need all of it. We need the legacy behaviors around infrastructure. So we, you know, we need our mainframe still because they have a distinct purpose. And like you mentioned, a lot of our FSI customers, that is the core of where a lot of their data and performance comes out of. And so it's definitely not a pull out and replace. It's more of how they integrate and how can you streamline them working together to create your end workflow. And as you mentioned, making it available to your organizations to consume as a service. So definitely a fan of being able to integrate and add to and everything has a purpose, is what we're coming to learn. Agility, the modern application, horizontal scalability. The cloud is the new data center. Walter, great insights. Always great to chat with you. You always got some good commentary. I want to ask you one final question. I asked Jason before he dropped off Jason Smith who was our guest here that hit a hard stop. What is the most important story that people should pay attention to this year at Ansible Fest? Remember, it's virtual. There's a lot of content around there. People are busy. It's asynchronous consumption. What should they pay attention to from a content standpoint? Maybe some community sites. Is there a discord group? I mean, how are you guys? What should people look at in this year and what should they walk away with as a key message? Take a minute to share your thoughts. Absolutely. So the absolute key message is that, kind of similar to the message that we have when it comes down to the other circumstances going on in the world right now is that we're all in this together. As an Ansible community, we need to work together, come together to be able to share what we're doing and kind of break down those silos. So that's the overall theme. I believe we're doing that with the new, so definitely pay attention to the new features that are coming out with the Ansible Automation Platform. I alluded to the on-prem automation hub. That's huge. Definitely pay attention to the new content that is being released in the service catalog. There's tons of new content that focus on the ITSM tools, so being able to integrate and leverage those tools in an easier map model. There's a bunch of network automation advances that have been made, so definitely pay attention to that. In the last teaser, and I won't go into too much of it because I don't want to steal the thunder, but there is some distinct integrations that's going to go on with OpenShift around containers and the Ansible Automation Platform that you're definitely going to want to pay attention to. If anyone is running OCP in their environments, they're definitely going to want to pay attention to this because it's going to be huge. Private Cloud is back, OpenStack is back, OCP. You got OpenShift has done really well. I mean, again, Cloud has been just a great enabler and bringing all this together for developers and certainly creating more glue, more abstractions, more automation. You know, infrastructure's code is here. We're excited for it. Walter, great insight, great conversation. Thank you for sharing. No, it's my pleasure and thank you for having me. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Your host for theCUBE virtual is part of AnsibleFest virtual 2020 coverage. Thanks for watching.