 Welcome back everyone. Live Cube coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2023. Also Ansible Fest folded in. This is our show wrap up. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with my esteemed co-host this week, Paul Gillan. Paul, been great. Rob Streche, analyst, breaking down all the action from theCUBE Collective. Guys, great show. Thanks for teaming up. I think we did a great job. A lot of other interviews came through. Good interviews today. Lots of great customer interviews today. Unbridled, they were out here, they had to let some come and just go. They don't script them and they're refreshing people to talk to. I love the open collaboration because it extends to the philosophy we just said. They don't script it. They're not like trying to handle them and like don't say this. I mean literally no PR people. We have a handler to make sure theCUBE runs smooth but Red Hat's an open source company, Rob. They're about transparency. They want to be out on the open. Anything that looks or perceives as hiding the ball? They're against. And I thought it was great in the fact that they really went through and looked at the fact that it's about simplicity. It's about transparency. It really truly is about a community that is open source and I think that's the key to their success so far and why I don't think anybody can replicate what they've built here. This is fantastic. So I want to get your thoughts on what you think the show was to you guys. I was doing a little TikTok videos, Reels for Kristen Nicole. Hey Kristen, thanks for all your support and team back at the ranch. The AI infuses everywhere. So the AI theme was everywhere. I thought that was solid. Then they had the whole edge thing was big, scale and the edge. And then the small little Dell announcement where they got an appliance coming. I thought that was bigger than it was impacted. It was kind of slid in the second day. But you got blocking and tackling day-to-day stuff that's got to happen with Red Hat. Then you got the AI surge over the top. Seems to be the big show. And obviously Ansible on the first day, day one of the Red Hat Summit was, I won't say dominate, but primarily Ansible. It's all about Ansible. Very interesting tell sign. Automation, cloud scale. What do you guys think? What jumped out at you, Paul? Well, I get the sense of having been to several Red Hat summits at this point. This is a company that's very confident in itself. And I think its confidence has grown over time as open source has taken hold. I saw some statistic that 97% of commercial software packages now have some open source component. It clearly is one. It's the way software will be, at least infrastructure software will be developed in the future. And I think Red Hat feels vindicated by that. And they're moving forward with confidence, believing that they have good structure and place for listening to their customers. Customers clearly are crazy about what Ansible is doing for them. We had some just super enthusiastic users on the program today. And Red Hat seems to be in a groove and knows what its customers want, and it is responding. They got a squagger, and they got a spring to their step. Quick question for you. I'm reading the headline here from a while back. IBM closes landmark acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion. Defines open, hybrid cloud future. Are they on that? I mean, we heard hybrid. That's what it is. And they're putting numbers on the scoreboard. They're confident. They're putting the results out there. Customers, products, partnerships. Open source exploded. And I think AI was a nice tail when it kind of came in. Rob, I mean, I mean. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, again, it's that multi-cloud edge hybrid has one thing. So it's not only that open source is one. It's that the right place for the right application as people transform them. And I think we heard throughout the whole thing, especially from the end users, like Paul was saying, very clear on where they are in their journey. I think people are still early on in their journey, but I think they're looking to that openness and some were very conscious of that they had tried and failed. And this goes back to the repatriation. Is it repatriation or is it being brought back so it can be put somewhere else again? And I think it's that case, which is key. And there's a point, yeah, to elaborate on that. It's trust. You know, you talk to customers. I've talked to many, many CIOs over the years and they don't, by and large, like the vendors they work with. They're suspicious of them. And I just don't sense that in talking to customers here. There seems to be, because of the openness, it's inherent in the Red Hat culture. There is a trust between the company and their customers that I just don't see very often. It's a partnership too. When you have that kind of trust, that means there's a relationship that's not the skeptical. Oh my God, I'm getting gouged. What's the price increase going to be locked in? Let me ask you a question, Paul, because you talked about, you've talked to a lot of customers. When IBM bought Red Hat, there was a lot of conversation. We were kind of, we kind of got it because we were covering what Irvin was doing before he became CEO. Kind of could see that kind of coming. There's a lot of critical analysis of IBM, like betting the ranch on Red Hat. It wasn't worth $34 billion. I mean, people, the jury's still out on that. I mean, I compared it to like, you know, when Google bought YouTube. YouTube just did $41 billion in revenue. All those people who said YouTube was overpriced at a half a billion dollars. I mean, YouTube isn't Red Hat, but what might seem big, given what's happening here, we saw the IBM John Granger came on yesterday. I mean, this is a lift for IBM. I mean, they get multi-cloud here potentially with Red Hat. Certainly, their last few earnings reports, IBM has cited Red Hat as a significant driver of new business, and it seems to be, and as well as a growth engine for the company. So at this point, it seems to be working out well for IBM. I have to admit, I have my doubts about it. When IBM paid $34 billion for a company that makes software that you give away for free, it didn't seem to compute at that point. But- It's a long gameplay. I think they saw something in that customer relationship, that customer loyalty that they could take advantage of. You know, Rob, one thing that came up, that Paul's kind of getting to the point where we kind of can see the visibility and maybe the crazy genius of the deal is you hear hybrid, talk about hybrid one, totally agree, but the game is, the game is multi-cloud, right? So like, I think the end game here is, we talked about multiple environments, we tried to, it didn't really hit the mark on this. We interviewed, we did, oh yeah, can you differentiate between environment and cloud, because you get cloud with stacks, Azure stack, Amazon stack, and then multiple, that question didn't land very well, but it brings the question up is that from hybrid, it goes multi-cloud. And if you give an open, compatible, distributed layer, Red Hat could be the winner. If they can extract all the value in their ecosystem for multi-cloud. I think if you look at it, the fact that Azure was on stage, Amazon was on stage, and you talk about how the GSIs are looking to this and building massive practices around OpenShift as their Kubernetes platform, because it is everywhere and can be everywhere, I think that becomes really intriguing, especially with MicroShift and Mini and all of these pieces that could go to the edge, Far-Edge as we talked about with Steven earlier today, I think it gets really intriguing at, what impact does this have with Kubernetes in general? This could put IBM in the category of a hyperscaler, because if you're a hyperscale like AWS or Azure, you're not out there promoting multi-cloud, that's your property, your own island. Like, okay, you want to be on premise for your workloads, but you got to know I'm going to work with another partner, IBM could be that glue layer in the hybrid that strings it together with Red Hat at the edge. Now I think VMware, maybe Broadcom might be thinking the same thing, Rob, what do you guys think about this? I think so, I think that is the whole Broadcom play with VMware. In fact, I wrote a piece on it last year about that and I look at this as they, I don't, it'll be interesting to see if they can execute. That's a whole different story, but I think the openness at which OpenShift has really been that flywheel for them and I think that they're leveraging off of that, calling it OpenShift data science, OpenShift AI and getting these different pieces that then tie into Ansible, which again, the automation and making it simple is key. I'm still somewhat mystified by what is IBM and what is Red Hat, you know, because we had... The tailwags a dog? We had representatives from Dell and HPE, which are strong IBM competitors on here and Red Hat has good relationships with those companies. Is IBM going to be the multi-cloud broker or is Red Hat going to be the multi-cloud broker and IBM drafts off of that business? John Granger from IBM said that he had, they got an Amazon team, they got an Azure team. I think they're thinking ecosystems, Rob. I think IBM's thinking I want to play in all ecosystems because, you know, Dave Vellante says this all the time, you know, when they lost the software business, you know, and then the cloud, they missed the cloud with BlueMix and SoftLayer, they have a great services business and they could be the uber uber global GSI for amongst the hyperscalers to create kind of some sort of maybe standalone. Now I'm stretching, but like, that's a 3D chess match. That's a string you pull, it has to work or it doesn't work. IBM should be the best Red Hat systems integrator out there. Right? They are the ones who can put those pieces together for customers who want flexible cloud arrangements. And it's interesting too, you mentioned that piece. If you look at Accenture, we had the Accenture Eidos guy on. We cover Accenture, we cover all the GSI's. They're all building their own cloud with their own differentiated servers, we call them super clouds. So they're going to have a tech stack that they're going to offer their customers. So the differentiation is going to be how well you can integrate into the cloud. But I think that that's exactly, and it's from, they hit on this in every keynote. It's about the platform. It's either platform engineering, it's platform automation, it's platform, platform, platform. And I think it's, how do they simplify that platform to be everywhere? So that they can be that, so you can build your stack. You want Accenture, HCL, Eidos, what have you built your stacks? Have at it. I'm very skeptical on the whole platform wars because remember the old days when OSI came out, that was about killing SNA, deck net proprietary NOSs or network operating systems, which at that time, if we could kind of go down this cloud route, it's similar things. Azure stack is different than AWS stack. So, you know, deck net, SNA, I mean, you got to get some standards. Well, TCPIP wound up being the one of doing that. Kubernetes, the center point. I think that's exactly why I think it's going to be interesting to see, are there enough, is there enough momentum with, you know, Azure Kubernetes service, Google Kubernetes engine or EKS over at Amazon to really rival what OpenShift is doing across all of these. Because EKS anywhere, which is their on-premise version, I've never seen it anywhere. So, which is funny about the name. You go and look at some of these other ones, supposedly with Azure stack on-prem, you have EKS growing. I don't know. I don't see them really pushing that narrative. So, I think to your point, is Kubernetes that ecosystem going to help? Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, you guys did an interview with David Lenticum at Deloitte, who's also a thought leader. What was his angle on things? Do you have a perspective on Red Hat? Well, I mean, he's a big fan. I mean, he's been, he's here and he leads the Red Hat partnership. I think he sees Red Hat as increasingly the power broker in multi-cloud environments. So, the big cloud providers are not going to budge on owning their wall gardens. And Red Hat is in the capboard seat for customers who want multiple clouds. It's interesting. Chris Wright, who's the CTO, came on early, later, earlier today, when I pressed him about the open source business models, he kind of reacted and made a profound statement actually. When I said, you know, in open source, I was using open source as a thing. Like in the open source community, he's like, no, no, it's not one thing. He was very particular to call that nuance out. I was using open source community like, oh, the big AI way is coming into the open source like it's one thing could topple over. He's like, no, it's very decentralized, very organic. I thought that was notable, Rob, that he brought that up because we've been asking that question to everyone. He's the first one to kind of say that. Yeah, and I think that's the interesting thing is where does AI fit in this whole spectrum of all of the open source? And is that something they can capitalize on or are they too low level? You know, and to your point about, are they, is Kubernetes as the platform, you know, can they take advantage of it and use it in their, as a part of the tooling? But... Well, they've got light speed and they've got insights for... Yeah, and the IBM research people are doing a lot in that. And I think maybe this is really where some of that IBM research DNA does really tie together the two companies in a way that's, you know, one plus one equals three. Did you guys hear much about security in over the two days? Not a lot of fanfare, but kind of like the classic line that it's in there? Well, when we talked to TransUnion about their move to the cloud and they're making a fairly major shift to the cloud, they said the main reason they did it was security. Yeah, and we also talked to Darren and a couple others. And they did, on this main stage, talk about SigStore, which is really supply chain, security supply chain. So they had some major announcements there. And Christian Uber from Etos. Etos, yeah. And he talked about they hardened the top of them. So maybe they're not bragging because they kind of got it. I think there's been a lot of announcements about that over the past few months. I think the big story was supply chain. Yeah, I think it's a huge story though. I mean, almost to the fact that, you know, there was a lot of supply chain attacks on open source and it's an open target. And I think maybe it's gotten so much press. Maybe that's why they haven't really highlighted it as much. This marker, that marker is kind of a layup for Red Hat though because they've been, you know, they have these very sophisticated supply chains they've built over the years using open source and they're just packaging them, packaging, selling them as a service. Yeah, I think, I want to know how that's going to impact the container and Kubernetes more. I think the OpenShift AI could be, could do some damage to the packing order, Rob. Yeah. I do think it's important what we heard from a couple of Red Hat guests about AI is they're very focused on domain specific AI. This idea of, you know, training an AI model on the whole internet has its flaws. And they're focused, they're not focused on trying to duplicate that. They're using AI for just Ansible, you know, with those just for OpenShift. Yeah, I think that. Or just for my shampoo at Ulta, which was very interesting conversation about how do you do that for recommendations within there and keep your first party data to secure? Guys, been a great show. Got a lot of customers that came on. I guess final question for each of you. Bottom line, your key takeaways from the show. Rob, we'll start with you. I thought the energy was fantastic and really the thread that was woven around simplicity is key to really execution. This company is going to be a major player in the future. It is, it's doing, it is on all the right tracks. And I think it is going to emerge as a major broker in the cloud world as well. Yeah, I mean, I think to me with Chump, that was the AI's transfused. You know, I think the multi-cloud is going to be a big play where it kind of clicks together. They kind of got hybrid, right? I think how they, well, how they commercialize RHEL in open source. I think they could shepherd open source with the AI wave. And I think if they get that with the hybrid, the tail IBM is Red Hat. Yeah, tailwags the dog. Well worth. Okay guys, thanks so much. That's the wrap. Red Hat Summit 2023 in Boston. Folding and Ansible, big story here. AI, distributed computing, hybrid, multi-cloud, simplifying the user experience, developer productivity, all that in the open source way. Red Hat Summit is closed. Thanks for watching.