 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back, happy to have you back on the program. Alessandro Perilli, who's the general manager of management strategy at Red Hat. Alessandro, good to have you again. Thanks for having me. All right, so we were talking, it's actually been since like OpenStack two years ago in Atlanta, the last time we talked to you, you would join Red Hat coming over from Gartner, looking at the whole management space, looking at OpenStack and what's happening there. So, tons of announcements this week. What's happening with the management portfolio from Red Hat? The management portfolio is really coming up in shape, I would say, it's getting really complex and articulated. We now have four different projects in the portfolio. We're Satellite, that is the historical product for management, we have CloudForms, that is the last product we were talking about when we met, and then we have Ansible, the AT automation company that we acquired the end of last year, and then we have this new offering that's called Insight. Insight is a departure from our traditional way of doing things because it's a software as a service offering. So we're quite excited with that product we entered the predictive analytics market. So, you see there are a number of different things that are lining up. All right, so Alessandro, when I looked at the press releases but my initial take was, wow, containers, containers and more containers. Can you talk about how long you guys have been working on some of these pieces and where kind of containers fits into the whole management discussion? Yes. So, management clearly has a critical role in managing containers as scale, right? There are two fundamental aspects, just like in virtual machines. You want to serve containers, or you want to manage containers. You can do that in a small deployment, you can do a scale, and depending on that scale, you use different tools. So, what we're doing in the management portfolio is being sure that we support OpenShift as an application, the host container, the serve containers up to a certain level of scale in terms of management, and then we provide an additional set of tools, which is our management portfolio, to go beyond that scale, around containers at very large scale. So, I would say that pretty much all our tools at this point already support containers in different forms today. Some of them are directly interconnected to OpenShift or a part of OpenShift, for example, CloudForms. CloudForms is the backbone, the management backbone of OpenShift, but then there are others that we have, like Ansible again, that can be used to manage containers at a very large scale. You talked a little bit about you're getting into SaaS-based offerings. Obviously, you've got community-driven projects, you've got some marketplace-driven things. Give us a sense, what's attracting customers to certain consumption models? Where are you seeing them? What's helping them more? Help us understand all these different options and how they can consume them. What are the trends that you're seeing from customers that are helping shape how they drive management? So, I'm just out of the stage where I was talking about these very topics during my presentation. And I was saying to the audience that we fundamentally see the line of business becoming the king in the decision and the developers within the line of business. And we see that there's a growing demand for a number of different aspects of enterprise at tea, that should change, that are changing. But there are three critical ones that I wanted to highlight on stage and still here. One of them is the ease of use, right? We see a demand for much more simplicity. You know, the enterprise at tea should be in terms of installation, in terms of consumption, what I often refer our social media as frictionless, I think. And then there is this demand for speed, in terms of getting the job done as fast as possible. And this is what is driving what we could call, I guess, programmable, I think. There's another trend that you've seen shaping out the expectation of the enterprise. And programmable IT is bought at the application level. Application exposes APIs, application interconnecting to each other through APIs, which is a nice story to clarify what we made the opposition of TreeScape just announced this week. But also at the infrastructure level, clearly. The analysts, many, many mentioned infrastructure as code as a trend that was growing, right? So infrastructure as code is one of the trends that you can put under the umbrella of programmable IT. And that's where Ansible makes sense. And there's three things. And the third thing is the demand for hybrid IT, okay? That comes from a need for modularity, composability. The capability to use only specific feature within a certain product, to feed a business case, a use case, or to use different products from different vendors, not necessarily from Red Hat, to compose in a best of great fashion for us to be the computing staff, right? So we're shaping the management portfolio after these three traits, these three demands, and the trends that come out of them. So when you look at insights, software as a service is meant to simplify the interaction with the tool, but also simplify the consumption, right? So also Ansible. Ansible was chosen out of the many competitors on the market because we saw this common trait that was independent developers, in the thousands riding on their personal blogs without any affiliation to Red Hat or any other company riding about their experience with Ansible and riding consistently that Ansible was so easy to use, so easy to learn, so easy to implement. So that is really driving the way we're composing the management portfolio. You talked a little bit about hybrid IT, hybrid, and you talked about simplicity. We hear over and over again from enterprise customers, government customers, anybody who's not a startup that says, look, the reality of our world is going to be hybrid in some form, right? I have applications existing that I'm going to build new. How are you thinking about the portfolio in terms of that hybrid need from end customers in terms of the tools that they use, how easy it is to consume? How much of that impacts what you're doing? So I will say something that probably would be a little bit unpopular as usual. The desire that is driving the shape, our effort in shipping the management portfolio is the one of bringing to the customers the consistent, the coherent single pane of glass to manage the traditional application and the new generation applications. Now, I heard in my past life and even today, from very many people, experts that I highly trust and respect that that is a myth, that it doesn't exist, that the single pane of glass will never work, it's just good and teary. And I understand what they're coming from when they make these comments, but I have a different opinion. I believe that there is a fundamental difference in the way we see the same topic. I want to use an analogy to clarify my point today. The TV remote that you have attached to every device you have in your living room, how many do you have in your living room? Three, four, five, yeah. So I have quite a few in my living room and I saw a lot of friends that have a lot of them. So I discovered an interesting thing which is when they get up to three devices in the living room, they can kind of deal with the different TV remotes that come with each device. When they go beyond four, it starts to become a nightmare. And so the users start to look for something simpler to get the job done, the universal TV remote, which is the single pane of glass. Now, if you think about how TV remotes are today, they are not trying to be a gigantic tablet that does all the buttons that you will find in every single remote they try to replace, but they just simplify, make more efficient the use of all devices together while maintaining consistency. Plus, there are some value in some cases like a programmable display, which was not meant to be in the original management tools. This is where I believe there is a value as a single pane of glass. Now, this is a full replacement of the original management tools, but it's a more efficient way to manage them in the most use functions. That makes sense, makes sense. So really trying to sort of not give anybody lesser functionality would give to them, again, simplicity, simplicity is going to lead to, like you said, less friction. It's going to lead to faster decisions being made. You wrote a great piece on the Red Hat blog a couple of months ago, your team had done a study looking at running your own open, sort of building your own open stack versus leveraging what Red Hat delivers as more of a package type of solution. Talk about the feedback you've gotten to that because it really highlighted where costs can be saved, where you're going to spend a lot of money on things that really may not differentiate your business, but what are you seeing in the market as the realities of that and the feedback you've seen from the market? So that was a very interesting kind of response that we got from the market and I want to clarify one thing, that was born as an internal research project. We had no interest and desire or plan to publish outside. And it was really starting, it started from my desire to understand better what would be the cost to the cost of ownership in certain conditions for a private open stack based plan. And we discovered along the way that there were a lot of elements that are critical in the calculation of a total cost of ownership and a total cost of ownership analysis that many other entities in the market didn't take into account. The most important of which was the cost of people, the human talent that you need to hire and retain and train and improve over time to get a very complex cloud like an open stack cloud going. So we published the result because we found that they were kind of new compared to what was available on the market with a huge response in terms of curiosity and interest. We got invited to present on stage at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo and in Austin and to a number of OpenStack forums around the globe. I think we presented to over 1,000 people worldwide so far, which is not bad. And to be more specific in the answer to your question, a lot of people got impressed by the cost per VM that you have at the beginning of your journey because it seems so high compared to many other total cost of ownership analysis that you will find on the market. And they couldn't understand the difference, the gap, the delta. So we had to explain and spend a lot of time in clarifying that the cost to the people is what inflating exponentially the cost per VM. The most the vendors usually don't take into account. But there is a huge demand to have additional information about that tool and to get more data. Now we're being requested to create an additional version of it that calculates just the impact of automation, not the whole cloud management platform to lower the cost of an OpenStack cloud. So I would say it was a good outcome for the research today. So Alessandro, when we look at in general just adoption of cloud, from an analyst standpoint, it's almost easy to be saying, I said last five years you could always fall back and say, management security or the friction and we're stopping customers from moving forward. So can you tell us the customers that you're talking to, how is Red Hat in general, Red Hat specifically and just the industry in general, doing to solve that management problem, reduce friction for the adoption going forward? Well, we're taking a number of steps and this is just the beginning of our journey, our march toward frictionless IT, right? We are trying to, as I said before, simplify the offering through certification of the application. So Insights is the first step in that direction. We're trying to pick in our merchant acquisition strategy the companies that are the easiest to use and to consume despite being very powerful enterprise IT. We try to simplify even the installation of the application. So if you look, for example, at CloudForms, CloudForms is a very complex cloud management platform, but it comes as a single virtual appliance that you deploy in 20 minutes versus a number of competitive solutions that can go as far as six, 12 different tiers that you had to deploy over the course of weeks. So we are taking a number of steps and it's not just that, we're also trying to simplify the documentation. We're looking at the licensing model. We're taking a full end-to-end analysis of all the areas of friction that we can simplify. And again, this is the beginning. We're looking into security areas. We're looking into a number of different areas where we can provide enterprise solutions at the management level, but still something that is much easier to what we have so far. It's complicated. It's definitely very complicated. But this is what the customers are asking, all around us, right? We cannot just ignore what they're asking and continue to deliver IT in the traditional way. And this is not just about Red Hat. I believe that the entire industry should push much forward in terms of frictionless setting. In fact, I see a number of competitors and partners that start to use the term and start to present solutions that are simpler to consume. I'm very pleased. I'm very pleased to see the industry moving in that direction. Great. I want to give you the last word. Is there a customer story here at the show, a demo, or some other thing that you say, oh, you know, if you don't see anything else when it comes to Red Hat's management portfolio, you want to make sure you seek this out at the show? I think that there are a number of customers that are implementing a few management components that we have in our portfolio. I'm not sure they are present today or they will arrive tomorrow, but Cox Automotive is definitely one of the guys that I will check. They have an awesome video where they explain very, very well how they implement the different components and what is the business value that they got out of it. So even if they are not present on stage, you can definitely find the videos and additional information about them. I would really check them out. All right, Alessandro Pirelli, really appreciate the update on the broad management portfolio here from Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Red Hat Summit 2016. 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