 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, John Troyer. Our next guest is Arkady Kenaveski, PhD director, software development at Dell EMC, service provider, business unit. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me here. So we were just talking before we came on. We're in the middle of the open here in the hall in Moscone West. But you guys have a definition of service providers very broad, Dell EMC guys. Dell's tons of equipment that they sell, providing a lot of the equipment. What is that? Just take a quick second to describe who you guys are targeting and your role here at Red Hat Summit. Sure, so we are a small portion within the Dell EMC portfolio and the organization I'm in, specifically creating a targeting solution for service providers. The service provider, the probably best known of service providers are telecommunication service providers, AT&T, Verizon, Telstra, all over the world. Very highly regulated areas and have been around forever. And they are going through the major transformation right now from the 4G to 5G network age and so on. But we are also covering a much larger set of the providers. If you can think of the hosted service provider, managed service providers, those are the people who either have as a core of their business providing the services for their customers. If you can think of the EBA or Amazon or Google, they have the services which are the running public cloud or not a public cloud for general sense but a specific purpose which they're delivering. Salesforce 4G. I mean, everyone's a service provider. If they're using cloud, there is some sort of service provider, right? If they're delivering their value through the service, then they're the service providers. If you are, you have the businesses which are still doing the business the way they were doing before, banks are not really service providers. They're not, I mean, yes, they communicate with their customers through the portals but that's not the purpose how they're doing business. It's great now in 2018, we are getting some clarity on cloud, right? We thought maybe it was all the public. Now we see that actually there's a lot of use cases for smaller public clouds, hybrid clouds, private clouds depending on people's needs. I'm curious how the service provider world, specifically like the MSPs and the telcos of the world are looking at what kinds of clouds they're going to provide and maybe also how they partner with the bigger clouds. So there isn't different angles there. So people, a lot of the work being done in a public cloud initially when they try to do the development of their new application because it's the easiest way for them to do it. But once you hit the next layer when you need to deliver it as a service in a specially more regulated environment where you have certain strict security requirement, you want to protect access to the data, a lot of the time they kind of do the hybrid model because it's much more it's, they have better control of what they're doing. I mean, some of the announcement and some of the demos which were done today and keynote today and the two days ago were clearly demonstrating this kind of approach. So we are partnering with Red Hat of developing the optimized platforms for the development and operation of those applications. All the way from RHEL and Linux layer all the way up to OpenShift and beyond? All the way we announced on Monday that we have our seventh joint version of Red Hat OpenStack already bundled. This is the first one where we start providing the workload optimized hooks such that customer can choose to optimize from the hardware to the operating system to the OpenStack for their specific workload. And we have a profile, predefined profile for NFV and we have a predefined profile for web-based application. And of course it's open source and extendable, flexible and provide what customers are expecting for their own use cases. How about the relationship between Dell, now Dell EMC, now Dell Technologies, a variety of other things. The relationship with Red Hat, how long, how many years, how deep, how would you describe the relationship time-wise and just duration and depth? Very happy to. So we started our relationship 18 years ago in 2001 was the first release of the laptops and the servers with a pre-installed rel on that on the factory and Dell, at the time Dell, was OAMing that solution for the customers. Over the years since that we started developing more and more solution for different customer domain. We have HPC-based solution, again, rel-based. We have SAP, we have Oracle and variety of different Hadoop, variation of the Hadoop, again, on the base rel platforms. And most recently the OpenStack over the last five years and at the Dell, Dell Technology World last week we announced of the OpenShift on bare metal as a joint solution between the two companies. We have the OpenShift on OpenStack which we announced two years ago, still supportable and delivered to our customers. So the goal for us is to provide the flexibility and choices for the customers. What's the unique value for customers that you guys bring to the table? What's the unique value with the Red Hat relationship that's the most important? So the most important is robustness of the integrated solutions and the two companies together standing behind them so they can go either to Red Hat or to the AMC and we're together delivering the solution. It is robust, it is still open and flexible but it is also optimized all the way from hardware to the top layer of the software for their use cases. So customers are concerned obviously we saw Spectra, Bug and all this stuff going off security. Red Hat customers, they're not micro coders, I mean they have to upgrade, you guys have to take that responsibility at the hardware level and it's a great certification, we know that. Going forward as the stacks become robust from down to the chip level up through applications we got DevOps, we got all these cool things happening. How are you guys keeping up with the pace to mitigate security risks and continuing the partnership? What's the story of the customers? What should they know about that particular piece? So obviously we are taking care of security on multiple layers from the micro code as you pointed out in the solution partnering not only with Red Hat but with Intel and hardware vendors to ensure that all of the mitigated mitigation factors are put into place for security but most importantly we are providing the tooling to make the patching and fixes in automated way without any disruption to the workloads which customer are running or minimizing the disruption for the workload. So you can do all of your securities updates and for that matter upgrades of the solution in such a way that you're minimizing the disruption for your customers. Okay, so security obviously hugely important. One of the themes of this event has been talking to the IT audience about kind of up leveling, you can call it digital transformation but actually bringing more business value. So and that's been really well received here as you realize this, all the demos to faster time to market, more business value, faster time to value. So as you talk with the customers here and service providers, what are they asking you as a director of the software stack that has to, that you could look at as just the bottom of the stack but in fact is hugely important in what they're doing. So what are you having to provide from the Dell side to help that acceleration? So the most important thing that our customer are looking for is partnership. They're looking for us working with Intel, with Red Hat and these partners specific to their area to do together integration and so we can provide the support and lifecycle of the solutions. You're kind of where the rubber hits the road. They buy the unit and the system and the software from you it better all be integrated and work. Correct. So again, they go on with us with Red Hat because they want to have a flexibility so they can add more things but what they're looking for especially Telco providers, they would like us to partner all the way down to the next level up is NFV vendors. The people who are providing them virtualized functions so they can bring that to the solution and have level of confidence and peace of mind that all of those pieces have been integrated together, validated together and we have a continuous program where we take care of them of the full upgrade on lifecycle of not individual pieces but the whole thing. What should customers know about your relationship with Red Hat? I want to get to end this with really important because I think this is important. We're seeing more and more security go from chip to the OS to the application layer. It's going to be more and more of that and you got to evolve your relationship and technology. Yes. What should they know about Dell? Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, Dell Proper and that's most important for them to understand what you guys do for customers. So one of the most important thing to understand now we're Dell Technology. We have been Dell Technology for about a year and a lot of the integration pieces start being mature and now we can have a joint integrated solution. One of the big piece of the Dell Technology portfolio is RSA. They're probably the oldest and the most established security company in the world and we are getting more and more integration of their tool sets into various solution across the board. And that probably is the unique value which we as a Dell Technology can provide because we have individual pieces which are leaders in their specific field and we can put all of those pieces together to have the value to the customers through one place. That's exciting. Well, thanks for coming on and sharing the insight. We love Michael Dell, been a big fan and Michael's been on theCUBE many times. He listens, he's probably watching right now. Hey Michael, how are you? Sorry I missed Dell EMC World or Dell World. But John, how was day with Stu? Great to have you on. We've seen the continued success and a lot of skeptics on that merger or the mergers or the whole thing and Pivotal just went public. Things are happening. Definitely exciting time to live in. Thanks for coming on. More live coverage here in San Francisco at Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Troyer, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.