 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. We've been talking to leaders around the industry about how they are helping their organizations and their customers in these challenging times with COVID-19. Really happy to bring back to the program one of our CUBE alumni. He also has a new title. Paul Cormier is now the president and CEO of Red Hat. Paul, it is great to see you. We live geographically not too far apart. Normally we would be getting together in person for summit, of course that event's happening digitally, but thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure Stu, always a pleasure to see you guys. All right, so Paul, you have a, you know, storied history at Red Hat, you know, I've sat through many keynotes where you walk through the product and portfolio, looked at the acquisitions, looked at the strategic direction moves. Taking the new job as CEO is a big move in regular times. Of course, we're not in regular times. We're in rather unique times here. So let's start there. What does it mean about coming into this new role in the times that we are facing? You know, as I see it, considering the times here, I think it's probably one of the biggest decisions I've made in my career to take on this new job only because, you know, Stu, we've talked a lot. I've been here from certainly the beginning of our move to the enterprise in 19 years. I was probably 120 or so. And I think, I actually think that we've brought such a big value to our customers. I think that customers actually are going to see even more value as we come out of this because then they have in the past. For one thing, with the combination of IBM, we're able to reach a wider set of customers out there that we can bring into the Linux world where all innovation's happening. So I think our customers, we've treated this, our product line as an enterprise-grade product line since the beginning, since day one. We're literally helping our customers keep their businesses running at this point on our product lines because of everything we've done to make them enterprise class. Yeah, so Paul, some previous challenges in my career, you talk about whether financial, whether it is natural disasters or 9-11, the technical industry needs to kind of rally together. But one of the things that is different about this is the impact it has on every employee. I wasn't surprised to see that the letter that you sent out to all of the associates was posted on the Red Hat site. It didn't need to be leaked or anything like that. So the transparency always is appreciated. But bring us inside a little bit, the organization. How are you helping your employees and making sure that they can deal with all of the personal things that they need to deal with while still being there for your customers? Sure, I mean, well, first of all, first of all, one of the things is, we're sort of used to working remotely when the need arises and even full-time for that case. A big percentage of our associates are working remotely 100% of the time. We've always had the philosophy in that we, especially in engineering, where we go after the best possible talent. And the unique part of being 100% open-source focused is that our engineers know the other engineers that are working in our communities. Whether they know them, whether they met them face to face, they certainly know them very well on a professional level. So a lot of our people, we're used to working remotely. The other thing is most of Red Hat is type A personality type people. So that's a good thing on some days and maybe a tough thing on other days. But what that means is everybody works from home at some period, whether it's, they go to the office all day and then wake up at midnight and do some more or it's a Saturday or Sunday, we're all pretty much set up to do that. So our IT department has been, they've been fabulous through this. We've had a gazillion more hours of both VPN and video hours and it's just all work. But they've had a great test bed for all these years. So from that standpoint, from that technical standpoint, it's worked very well. From the employee standpoint, we've really picked up the video, all hands video conferencing from once a quarter to every two weeks. And so I had an all hands meeting two days ago, three days ago when I was announced on my new role and I committed to them, we're gonna have an all hands every two weeks. Come in talk, we'll give you the updates, et cetera. So I think that's one thing you can't over communicate at a time like this. And I think the third thing that, I guess that's to say my former products group now, but I still love those guys. My former group, the products group, they actually had a very great idea. They're holding virtual office hours for their colleagues in the field once a week. And we're actually holding once in the morning, once later at night for the people in Asia Pacific actual hours with the product managers the engineers, et cetera, getting on video conference to integrate and in talk with the folks out in the field about what we're doing in the products and what's going on and what's upcoming and hear their issues as well. I think this serves as two things. The first thing this serves, certainly it keeps people engaged, but secondly, our people love the technology. And so to some extent with everything going on around COVID and how serious it is in every country, it almost gives our people almost an escape from that to really spend an hour or two a day on this and just really have conversations with each other about the business and the products and the technology. So that's become a really big hit inside as well. Yeah, definitely there are some things that just get amplified. You talked about, we're used to being able to be on or join meetings, regardless of the time of day. I'm sure your team plenty of blue jeans and zoom meetings before this, but it has taken a slightly different tone now you've now got everybody at home and managing other personal relationships and things that are happening on the outside. You were still holding Red Hat Summit at the end of April. I think there's a real strong push from your team to balance and make sure that you're there for your customers, but it's not going to be as much of the hoopla. There's not the swag and the announcements that are going on. Why is it important to still bring the community together and meet with your partners and customers rather than push it off to later this year? You know, it's a great question. I said in my note that when I stand up on stage for my keynote at the summit every year, even though I'm so many years, I don't even know how many summits, 13, 14, something like that, even when it's such a rush because I really do stand there. Jim talked about this on our internal handoff where he said, you know, remember Paul and I in a ballroom at one of the first summits at some hotel, we looked behind the curtain and I said to him, wow, there's 300 people out there. And you know, last year in Boston, I looked out and said, wow, there's 10,000 people here. It's amazing. So it really started as a way to really talk to and interact with both our customers and our community as well, but it turned into a celebration and not just a celebration of internal Red Hat people, the celebration of the whole ecosystem and partners and customers and upstream people of how far open source in Linux has come. And we didn't think that celebration part this year was really appropriate considering where we were, but we all still have a job to do. We're all doing it remotely. And as I said, we're running many of our customers business. So we felt it was really important to put this out there to have our customers understand where we're going in the coming year, some of the new products that we have coming and how we can help them. And so that's really more of the tone this year and we feel that's still important. We all have a big job right now and coming out of this, we're even going to have all bigger jobs and how we re-entry into this and balance that. So that's really the focus this year, how we can continue to help with the technology we brought to the enterprise for the last 19 years. Yeah, Paul, the last question I have for you, I think back to summit last year, Satya Nadella is on stage, Jennie Rametti was up on stage. Of course, Red Hat tightly tied into a broad community and ecosystem network out there. So as the leader of Red Hat, how are you in contact and working with the communities and the partner ecosystem to both manage through and be ready for the other side of what we're facing today? I mean, in one regard, especially with many, it's almost more at this point. I mean, the partners in the ecosystems are really important. Many of the partners, especially the smaller partners, they look to us for leadership. So we still have communication with them. And partly the summit is for them as well. Some of the larger partners, like that you mentioned, Microsoft has certainly IBM and Amazon and Google and others. We actually communicate almost more now that we're all working from home. Because as I said earlier, the same goes outside as it does inside. You just can't over-communicate this environment. And as you know, Stu, the tech industry, it looks like this giant industry, but it really is kind of a small industry. And a lot of us know each other from many years. And so that communication is going on. We're comparing notes. Actually, in many cases, we're comparing notes maybe even more than we might have in the past. So what are you guys doing at your company to plan for this? And I've actually seen some of the partners who focus in proprietary technologies even become a bit more open on those discussions now. So I think maybe that could be, if there's any good outcome of this, that could be one of the outcomes that's slightly positive. All right, well, Paul, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on your new role. We absolutely are looking forward to the summit at the end of the month. Thanks again, always great to see you Stu. Thanks very much. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net where you can see the preview of Red Hat Summit as well as the guests that we will have there. We will have Paul, Stephanie, Matt Hicks, lots of the Red Hat executives, their customers and partners. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.