 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well good morning and welcome to day three of our coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2019. We're live here on theCUBE, we're in Boston, Massachusetts and with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us for our last day of coverage. We're now joined by the SVP of Dell Technologies, Pete Manca, Pete, good to see you this morning. Good to see you. And Pete, by the way, is coming with, I'm sure a song in his heart and a smile on his face, two and a half hours to get in today. It was a long drive in, but I'm here now, I'm excited to be here, this is a great show and here with great partners. Yeah, the tough part's over, right? Tough part's over. We're in Boston, not in Vegas, so that you've got to be a little bit fast to get that point out. So there are some consolations. That's a good point. All right, let's just first off, let's paint the umbrella here a little bit about the overall partnership between Dell EMC and Red Hat and how that's evolved and currently where it stands for all the new releases I've heard about this week. Yeah, it's been a great partnership for almost two decades now, right? Dell and Red Hat have been working together on a lot of different products, from ready stack or ready architectures and ready nodes to software sales support, customer engagements, it's been a tremendous partnership for 20 years and I expect to be going for another 20 years. All right, Pete, let's dig in a little bit, walk us through the stacks, if you will, a bit. We understand, you know, Red Hat is an operating system, you know, long history working on all the Dell platforms. You've got the converged environment. Where does Red Hat fit and what pieces of their ever-broadening portfolio fit in? Right, so really on the ready solution side of the world, which is another part of the products that I managed for Dell. So within the ready solutions environment, we work with Red Hat and OpenStack and we deliver hardened, supported OpenStack products to both telco and enterprise markets and then we also deliver OpenShift and the ready node and the ready solution environment so we can deliver that container, managed container environment for those same enterprise and service provider customers. Yeah, so as you know, the cube is at, you know, Dell Technologies World last week and at that show in here, I saw a sizable breakout for telecommunications. You know, we can talk lots about enterprise, but, you know, telco's got some certain special requirements, you need to make sure it's certified for certain things and you know, got to be tested out. Maybe talk a little bit about what those customers are looking for and why that match of Red Hat makes sense. Sure, I mean, telco really wants to have control over their environment and they want to have open source is a great technology for telco, right? And they love taking the technology, customizing it for their own environment, reselling components to their end users and OpenStack from Red Hat is a perfect fit for that market and so, again, we deliver that in a hardened solution on top of Dell Technologies on Dell PowerEdge servers, deliver that to the telco market and provide them the tools and the capabilities they need to deliver the solutions to their customers. Yeah, what is it? Let's dive in just a little bit then about those specific traits or attributes, you think, in terms of the telco market goes. You know, what is it specifically about, you think, their needs that they find so attractive about open source and what makes them stand apart from other industry sectors? Yeah, to me it's control and customization. So rather than taking a packaged app that's shrink wrapped and running it like everybody else, they want to be able to customize and control for their markets. They have certain, as Stu mentioned, they have certain standards and compliancy that they have to deal with. They also want to differentiate within that telco market, so that's hard to do without having control around the underlying stack. I think those are the big attractiveness around it and then, you know, the solution from Red Hat combined with Dell is such a enterprise quality product for the telco market which I think has certain advantages as well. Okay, so Pete, you mentioned, you know, the ready solutions and open stack piece and then on top of that, there can be open shift. So a lot of news, you know, to talk to, you know, many of the customers, the executives team on the team here, open shift four, showing good momentum over a thousand customers. So how does that fit in with the solutions you're offering? Well, so we offer a ready solution for open shift as well, right? And we see that as the container solution for the market that really wants those open source type products and has aligned themselves with Red Hat and Linux. And so it's a perfect solution for that. And, you know, we really see open shift as the ability to create a managed environment for containers. As we saw from Paul's keynote, with open shift four now, it provides a tremendous hybrid cloud experience for customers that want to migrate workloads, both on-premises to cloud and back. And so we think that's tremendous technology that will add value. And with our hardware technology underneath that, we can provide a stack that we think services the market quite well. Yeah, it's funny, Pete. You know, you've got a lot of history and I've worked with you for many years on this. The ultimate, a lot of these technologies, you go back to server virtualization, you look at containerization and Kubernetes, they're like, oh well, we want to abstract up to allow the applications to be able to be modernized and do these wonderful things. And I shouldn't have to think about the infrastructure. But we know at the end of the day, it lives on something and it needs to be good. Talk a little bit about things like Kubernetes and where Dell thinks they fit from an infrastructure standpoint compared to Kubernetes. Yeah, and what we want to do is provide the infrastructure that makes it easy for workloads and applications to preside on, including OpenShift and Kubernetes environments, right? And so really what you want to do, and for years, as you say, we've got a lot of history in this, we've been trying to push that complexity and management up the stack. So the hardware and even the virtualization layer and the container layer become an afterthought, right? And what I saw from OpenShift 4 is that really puts the power back into the application developers and makes it easier to manage and control your underlying hardware environment. So with tight integrations into the OpenShift community, with our Dell technology stack, we can provide that sort of seamless infrastructure layer that allows the application developers to go do what they need to do and not be worried about infrastructure management. Do you have any customer examples that might help highlight the partnership? No, I don't have any. We're not, I didn't, sorry, I didn't come with a customer. Well, let's talk about four a little bit. I mean, you talk about hybrid and what that's going to enable there. Is that the, oh, here we go for you on this in terms of what's new, what's the latest? I mean, what about the capabilities you're going to get now out of for and what's going to be offered and what is it that's kind of jumping off the page to you that says, yeah, this was worth the wait? Well, to me it was all about the management and the automation and the underlying infrastructure. Just again, taking that complexity away from the developers and putting it, allowing the application developers the tools they need to do to very quickly develop applications but also migrate them to the proper landing spot and maybe cloud one day and maybe on-premises the next. One of the beauties of cloud is there are classes of applications that may not necessarily fit on a public cloud. You may not know that until you get there and you want to have the flexibility to push them out and see how they work and bring them back in and OpenShift gives you all those capabilities, OpenShift 4. Yeah, so absolutely what we hear from customers, it's not the future, it's hybrid and multi-cloud, it's today and the future are both hybrid and multi-cloud today. To that point, I wonder if you can help us, it's not Dell specific but VMware made an announcement today that they're supporting OpenShift 4 on top of VMware. Can you maybe explain where that fits into the overall discussion? Yeah, so look, Dell is all about providing choices to customers and we want to be, and we are the essential infrastructure company to the enterprise and commercial environments and so OpenShift on VMware is just another example of choice and customers are going to have different application environments out there. They're going to run some containers, they're going to run some in VMs, they're going to run some native. We want to be the infrastructure provider for that and we want to work with partners like Red Hat to provide choice to our customers. And we've heard a lot this week about flexibility and scale and options and I understand providing choices a great thing to customers but what does that do for you in terms of having to answer to all of that desire, the flexibility? Well, it's opportunity and it's challenge, right? Supporting all these different environments of course is a challenge for our engineering teams but it's also opportunity if we want to be and we are the essential hardware technology player in the industry, we have to support all of these leading platforms and OpenShift is just an example of that. Yeah, the challenge on that side of it, I get opportunity but you have to develop that expertise throughout your force and that probably has its own challenges. It does and we have to have expertise not only in our own technologies like VMware but also OpenShift and other technologies or Red Hat technologies, we have to hire and cultivate open source engineers which is not always easy to find and we have to develop those expertise that know how to integrate those components together, right? It's not just a matter of taking the software and laying on top of an x86 architecture and saying it's done. We want to be able to integrate that so we provide the best experience to the customers so having that capability to understand what's happening at the hardware infrastructure layer but also what's happening at the virtualization and container layer is a critical piece of knowledge that we have to grow and continue to work with. Yeah, but what about, I mean, as far as the competitive nature of the workforce, then I kind of, I'm thinking about it, it's almost like waves. The more people who use it, the tougher it is to get around, right? Because so the more people who are moving toward open source, the more, which is great but it also the more competitive the hiring becomes, the training becomes. It does bring with it, certainly, I wouldn't say barriers by any means, but a different factor. It's a challenge across the entire industry right now, hiring good technical people and it's not just an open source space, it's an all spaces. Open source is a particular challenge because it takes a certain set of skills to work in that environment. Dell has a philosophy where we are continually looking at university hires and growing from within. We try to hire as many new hires, new grads as we can. But the reality is we have to look everywhere in order to try to find those resources. They're very hard to come by and it's very competitive to get these employees or these candidates, once you find them, it's hard to get them in. It's a competitive environment out there. So it's interesting, just step back for a second here. Last week at your show, it was eye opening to see Sacha Nadella up on stage with Pat Gelsinger. While Microsoft environments have lived on VMs for a long time, as far as I know, the first time the two CEOs have been publicly seen together. Fast forward to here and once again, we saw Sacha Nadella up on stage with Red Hat. It's, for years we think about the industry as to the competitive nature and what's going on and who's fighting who. Multi-cloud, it's not like it's everybody's holding hands and singing Kubernetes kumbaya, but it is a slightly different dynamic today than it might have been in the past. It's very different in the past when there are more infrastructure players, more software players. You could pick your swim lanes and you can compete. Now the lines are blurred and cloud definitely has a lot to do with that, right? And hybrid multi-cloud has everything to do with that because if your application's going to run on AWS one day, on-premises the next day, in Azure the next day, you better have tools, processors and procedures that allow those applications to migrate across that multi-cloud experience. And so what it forces vendors to do is get together and participate in a co-opetition, whatever your favorite word is for competitors working together, but that's really what it is, is we've realized, look, hey, Dell Technologies, VMware's part of our family, but we're working with Red Hat. We're working with Microsoft, and Red Hat, as you see, is doing the same thing. It's necessary in today's market, in today's environment, that you just have to do that. Well, Paul, you mentioned swim lanes. I hope the Express lane is open for you on the ride home today. I hope so too. Good luck with that. We had a great time this morning too. Good to see you. It's a home game for you, so it's not all bad. It's not all bad, no, this is a great place to be, and it's a great event, and I'm glad I could be part of it. Very good, thanks for being with us. Thank you. Back with more live coverage here. You're watching theCUBE, our coverage, Red Hat Summit 2019.