 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, and I'm joined with Stu Miniman at wikibond.org, filling in for Dave Vellante this week. Stu's doing a great job, the lead analyst on cloud and infrastructure for wikibond. And our next guest is Scott Mosin, Vice President of Global Strategic Alliance at Red Hat. Thanks for joining on theCUBE, appreciate it. Oh, fantastic. Glad to be here. Thank you for having me. The ecosystem has always been one of those, I love when we go talk to the big, the ecosystem strategic. You actually have to deal with the ecosystem, Red Hat, business model is based upon a really solid, robust ecosystem over the years, strong foundation, but big names around Red Hat now, around the emerging cloud and the data center transformations that are going on, software to find everything, Cisco first time here, news with SAP today, Dell announcing the news, just a lot of action. So, global alliances, are you busy? You know, the cool thing was, we actually did a advisory board for the first time yesterday with our strategic partners. So, we had about 15 companies represented, about 22 people, we spent five hours, and we asked them, what could we do better to be a partner in the ecosystem? And the great news is they told us. So, we had Jim participating, we had our BU leads, Brian, et cetera, and the reality is, we're doing well in a partnering model, but when you get beyond kind of a one-to-one relationship, it gets a little more complex, and everybody's trying to get better. Yeah, and you know what, the old world co-op competition's been around for years, and in a growing market, you got to play well in the sandbox, so to speak, in these emerging areas. So, I've got to ask you, what is the current state of the Red Hat Alliance, a strategy? Austaly, everyone's building out, you got some disruption going on, so you might have some hurt feelings on one hand, happier partners on the other, people who are neutrals and early adopters, fast followers, what does the landscape look like for you? And give us an update on kind of the report card of, you know, where's the sentiment in the end? Who do we really like and who do we kind of like? Yeah, but give us an update on kind of, because there's some disruption going on, and where are you guys focused, and you know, who's stepping up, and who's knocking it out of the park? Well, if you look traditionally at Red Hat and the partner model, right, it's, we're an, have been historically an infrastructure-centric company, which means Linux tied to servers. And so, kind of, if you look back four or five years, the server vendors were kind of core of our partner strategy. Fast forward, we have a broad portfolio, we're driving solutions into the cloud, and I think to your point, there's some disruption going on. So what we're really doing, we're not abandoning anybody that's been working with us over the past years. All those companies that we work with to really build the rel, and then the JBoss business are all still strategic partners, and as I mentioned, they were in the room yesterday providing feedback. But we have to broaden the aperture and the portfolio to make sure that we're addressing customer needs. And that means adding companies like our system integrator partners, our service provider partners, cloud providers, those become as strategic as the OEM partners were historically. The key for us, though, is we have to kind of build, you mentioned the word ecosystem, but we have to continue to build an ecosystem of partners that can deliver integrated solutions to the market. Now, you mentioned the disruption element. We're pretty comfortable in that kind of co-optition space. So we're gonna continue to partner with companies around given technologies, but we're also gonna look for a few key partners that are willing to stand up and stand behind Red Hat. So you saw some announcements today, like from SAP, you saw some announcements from Dell, Cisco, which you mentioned are here for the first time with a great keynote, I thought. And so we're looking for partners in some of the emerging technologies that are really, really gonna align behind Red Hat and the Red Hat solution staff. And so we're finding those. And then they're asking, and kind of key to the message yesterday is they're asking us to build and help them build an ecosystem to take those to market. So who do you partner with on the service providers? There's a lot of disruption, there's also opportunity, there's also, you know, you got disruptors who are disrupting and then the disruptees who are being disrupted. And then you got a slew of startups like Dockers doing well, some are maybe not getting traction doing some pivoting, as they say. So you got the disruptors and the people being disrupted, okay? That's going to generate some money opportunities for people. So in comes the enterprise-grade conversation. And that's really where the action is. They got developers on one end and you got enterprise-grade. Now really the two major conversation media areas. So let's talk about enterprise-grade first. Those are the all-usual suspects on your list, right? HP, IBM, Dell, et cetera. And then what else is new in that area? Because now OpenStack brings up some fragile conversations around is it enterprise-grade? And that's the main conversation. So what's your take on how do you navigate your alliances map in the enterprise-grade area? Yeah, so great question. But I think if you look at where we're trying to go and us and others in the industry around enterprise-grade capacity in OpenStack and probably the same in OpenShift, we're taking a leading stance there, but we're also partnering pretty closely with others that can help us get there. And it's a couple things. It's technology alignment with companies like, as we talked about Cisco and Dell, who are also trying to not be disrupted and to be a little disrupting in the marketplace. So they're participating in open-source projects and communities that if you look back three or four years ago, you wouldn't have thought Cisco was a contributor in an open-source project, but now they are, right? And so... And by the way, fundamental, we had Padma on yesterday, fundamentally behind it, not just lip service. If you look at the contributors to the new technologies in the open-source community, they're up and rising across the board. You'd expect if they were going to do it, they'd do it in networking, but they're not just doing it in networking. They do it in management. They're doing it in poor infrastructure. So it's fantastic to see. And we kind of feel like, maybe we helped lead them down that path a little bit, and certainly they're helping to drive us into the enterprise gate. Which two and I were talking about the, what attracts people to markets is money, right? Opportunity to make a profit, new entrants come in, and certainly the enterprise grade saying, if we don't get in there, we will be cannibalized. And that's really, we see that driving force, do we? Yeah, so Scott, I'm curious, as you shift from not only being Linux, but you've got virtualization, you've got cloud, how do you work with your partners to incent them to sell the whole solution set? Well, it's interesting, it's more of, I would say it's more of a market response, right? So our strategy is, as you guys know well, we're open source, we don't build IP, but we can innovate with the community. And so we share that process and model with our partners, and those that choose to come along, get to participate. And the market is really demanding today that there's an alternative to the proprietary stacks. I spent eight years at a proprietary software company before I joined Red Hat. And one of the reasons I came over was, this is directionally where the marketplace is heading, right? The customers are demanding it, they're looking for an alternative. And so as that noise gets louder in the marketplace and you see it here by the attendance at Summit, that our customers are demanding that that become an alternative. And so the partners are knocking on our doors, as opposed to us having to go in and send them. I think everybody recognizes that as the market continues to evolve, there's money to be made. And frankly, and you mentioned enterprise grade, but one of the opportunities is in complexity, which surrounds the nascent technologies, there's also opportunity, right? So there's opportunity for services and integration. And so we're seeing the big service integrators and system integrators come to us and engage around how do we drive some of that into the customer space. So it's a fun place to be. Yeah, so if we look back, IBM put a billion dollars into helping drive Linux forward. That's right. Do we need a similar type of investment on the open stack side? I think that's a fair question. My response would be probably not, although if you look at the cumulative investment from this set apart, even the small set of partners that we touched on, my expectations, they're probably spending that and more in this industry today, right? So I think it's not so much that somebody, one large company has to funnel an investment to make it happen, but a set of large companies and ecosystem is already doing it. Yeah, some of the conversations we've been having at the show is, if you talk about the infrastructure with open stack and then the platform layer with open shift, there still isn't kind of consensus over, you know, who do those completely go together? You know, can they just stack on tip with each other? Which platform is going to win? So, you know, can you bring us through some of the conversations you're having with the partners and, you know, how do you come to consensus as to, you know, driving a solution forward to the customers are going to walk? Well, you know, on the open stack side, and you're right, there's not consensus, but there's starting to be some aggregation. So there's some kind of clear cut winners that are emerging in that space, and I think you're seeing some alignment behind those companies. Some of our partners have chosen to invest in their own distributions in that space, and that's great, and we'll continue to partner, and frankly, as we grow the market, everybody's tied rises, so that's a benefit at the end. So Jim, the CEO, talked yesterday with us in a great interview that he said, we see the four areas of disruption, and I want to get your take on how you're looking at your alliance plan around that. The physical, virtual, private, and public. So obviously data center, cloud, okay? Do you segment your partners that way, or do you look at it a little bit differently? The way we segment it as I kind of open really is, when I look at it in Jim's words, and probably should, probably should, right? It pretty much aligns to that space. So if you look at kind of the physical space, that really kind of plays back to our core OEM partners, as well as the storage vendors, like NetApp and I mentioned EMC. If you look at the virtual space, that starts to play with a couple of other additional partners, and then when you get into the stack, or the app piece, right? We're adding strategic partners, and you mentioned them, but they're smaller disruptor type people. So in the last few months, we've added companies like MongoDB, and Hortonworks as part of the strategic portfolio, because we have to be able to offer that disruption on top of the platform that you mentioned. It sounds like you're breaking it down into, because Red Hat's got some legacy, if you don't be careful, you might be disrupted, right? That's what you guys got to worry about. And Jim was talking about being complacent. Actually, Paul Cumber here was like, hey, we're at a deck, and we were on top of the world, and then within years toppled down to nothing. But so you could be disrupted. You're kind of a legacy, you have legacy, you have clients that have stuff. We think about it every day. And you also want to have the new technology come in as well, so you got to balance those. So that's what I think I hear you saying. So how do you succeed? What's your strategy? The ecosystems are a certain formula. I mean, what do you do to be successful? You guys invest dollars in co-marketing. Is it joint code? You guys, it's all about code. How do you? Well, you know, so the joint code piece is kind of an interesting thing, because we don't really write a lot of code. Co-marketing dollars move to code dollars. Exactly, but when we do write IP, we work with our partners on capacity or functionality. So if a partner approaches us and says they need something to help drive an incremental function in the system, we'll do it, but then we put it back into the community because that's part and parcel of what we do. The success really ties back to, I think, investments we make early with our partners by putting resources with them and on them, but from a management perspective, but also from a technology perspective, so we can align, understand their roadmaps, and they can understand directionally where we're heading, and then really helping to define where the market opportunity is. And so we do, we invest in marketing dollars and demand gen. But Red Hat's a different company than, say, like an HP that has channel marketing and it's a groove swing, right? I mean, you get resellers, integrators, and so on, and it's a proven formula. Red Hat's, you've got multiple dimensions. You've got technology contribution, you've got joint engineering, and then maybe some co-marketing things. Is that, did I get that right? Is that kind of the complexity? So we're not structured dissimilarly, and I actually spent some time in my career at HP. We're not so dissimilar in our structure, maybe on a different scale, right? So we have a channel that we leverage, but I think what's different is we actually are partnering with companies like HP and IBM, Dell and Cisco, et cetera, and leveraging their investment in those routes to market, right? So a lot of what we take out, we don't necessarily take out through our direct sales force or HPs, but through HP's channel. You guys can go to market in any different formula. You guys, you can go to market with or have them lead, you lead. And we're happy to have them lead, right? Yeah, exactly, that's value add. If you think about the partners that we work with, it's about a trillion dollars worth of net demand, right? And so they represent and can touch a lot more things than we can touch. What's the biggest goals for you this year in the alliances? Because obviously having the kinds of announcements you guys have at the show here with Dell and SAP, and Dell in particular is very impressive with OpenStack and OpenShift. You know, a nice notch on the belt for Red Hat, but Cisco I think really is a game-changing relationship because they are a critical component of the infrastructure and have been criticized for being a little bit too, you know, Cisco-like, and they're looking more like Intel. You know, they want to be an enabler. They want to be northbound, southbound, east-west APIs, right and whatnot. So what are your goals for the year as an organization? So I'll give you the kind of the key to, and the good news is I have a review next week when I get back, so they're somewhat fresh. The first is to continue to grow the core business around RHEL and JBoss because that's fundamentally one where we're making our money today. And two, it's the foundation for the new technologies. And that's one of the things that's kind of key to how Red Hat's looking at some of the opportunity around things like OpenStack and OpenShift is they're built on a foundation of RHEL, commercial-grade software that is an OS that companies have leveraged. And so the first one is to make sure that we're continuing to expand our footprint there. We have about two-thirds of the paid Linux market and we're continuing to take share. And so that's number one, and that means continuing to work with the partners that we referenced earlier. The second is to find a few, and I think we've talked about them, a few partners that are going to stand behind the Red Hat in the new technology space. So Cisco has, Dell is, SAP's made some announcements. Docker. Docker obviously is going to be there. So it's not just size of the company, it's relevance. It really is. And if you look at the big data space, right? So, Mortonworks is particularly relevant, that space Mongo's making waves. So we're looking at those partners again that are willing to make a commitment to Red Hat and in reciprocity, we'll make a commitment to them and that's how we invest our go-to-market dollars. Well, you guys do a fantastic job. I got to give you props at Red Hat. I know sometimes it's a bull in a china shop to make things happen in big companies, but you guys have a hard job because you have a lot of constituents to please. And with the JBoss and Linux markets, essentially that's the, those are two communities. You've got essentially Dev and Ops. That's right. That's Dev Ops, right? So you guys are the DevOps company that's out there, that's the most commercial grade that we've found. Sure there's no JS stuff going around it, but like, you know, JBoss and Linux, that's DevOps. That's right, that's in-house. And it's a moneymaker point. And you still have to pay to refine that, right? So we got to get better at pulling those two things together, just like the rest of the marketplace that's trying to solve the DevOps phase. That's the two monster ecosystems. Yeah, it's enormous. And I think even if you talk to the enterprise customers that I know you do, that they're all struggling to make that connection. DevOps is a buzz, but if you look at the instantiation, and I talked to a lot of customers this week, the execution of DevOps is a lot harder than just kind of putting the words together. I mean, you know, it's really tough. We were talking about this yesterday. The technology discussions usually drive everything. Now it's not. It's this combination of the intersection of the business outcomes. And it's the business objectives. We heard on stage yesterday that the SLA is guaranteeing business outcomes in advance of doing things. That's a service. What are you mind blowing? I think about it from tech industry. It's stunning. Right, and frankly, and then you talked about kind of how to immature the emerging technologies. We have to partner to be able to deliver that capacity. We can't do carrier grade SLAs to enterprise customers for banking transactions without having some other companies along with us. You know, Wikibon has done some studies over the years around the whole services angle, the services business being disrupted. You see, you know, CSC buying service mesh for orchestration. You're seeing some of the consulting firms. IBM with software, right? Integrating in these practices that might have their own clouds someday and be a provider. But the integration of disciplines has really been a fundamental shift even at the collegiate level in courseware and computer science to partnering. So I think in DevOps too, on the programming side, this interdisciplinary really forces that partnership is table stakes these days. Oh, it's, if you don't know how to partner well, right? No, you mentioned a couple of companies. No one can deliver it all to the industry. You know, IBM years ago was kind of an island to itself in many ways. They're one of the better partnering companies in the industry. So I totally agree. So what do you say to the folks out there that are watching potentially for, that might be potential partners that are partners? How, what's the best way to partner with Red Hat? Knowing all the nuances of Red Hat, knowing that there's an ecosystem behind it, knowing there's a lot of growth coming, certainly a lot of disruption, horizontal scale, new categories being reshifted, recategorized, and you guys are in the OS business. How do they partner with you? Yeah, so I would say first off, spend a little time and understand the open source model first, before you study Red Hat. We think they're part and parcel, you know, pretty closely linked, but the open source model is a disruptive technology in and of itself, so if you're a company and you don't understand how that works, it's worth your while to spend a little cycle there because I think your customers are going to start to ask about it. That's the first thing. The second thing is then let's look at opportunities with Red Hat, particularly in the new technology space where they can come in, look at how do they leverage the pieces we're bringing together, the communities that we're catalyzing, as Jim would say, and choose where they want to participate, and then we'll figure out a way to find a partnership. Most of the partners of these companies that you're talking about are also partners with ours. They're part of the ecosystem, right? So it's a matter of how do we align them with guys that we're already spending time with? So Scott, you've been with Red Hat less than a year. I'm curious what you've learned since you've joined on board, that you'd want to share with people that potential customers, partners, that you maybe didn't know before you joined. So the reason that I said, study a little open sources, because that was an education for me, right? I mentioned Proprietary Software Company prior to. I would tell you that I think that model is fairly compelling, and so it's made me even more excited for having joined. So that's kind of the first thing that I learned. I would tell you that I think selling free software is probably harder than I thought it was when I got here. So you kind of have to make sure that your value proposition is well-defined and articulated. I would say for a company that's been around a reasonably long time, it still feels like a startup, and some of that is because of these new technologies, these emerging areas are just super exciting, right? And we're small and young and nimble, and so that's really an attractive thing, I think, to spend time around. And frankly, the last thing I'd say is the culture. So Red Hat is a cool place. It's unique. It's very different than other places I spend. It's got a completely different culture than most of our partner communities, but it's cool. I mean, it's really fun. So my final question for you is, as we get ready for the OpenStack Summit coming up in Atlanta where theCUBE will be there for three days, broadcasting live, and our second time covering it live, we've been covering OpenStack for quite some time, but never on theCUBE, second year in a row. I want to ask you, what are you expecting to see there? You talked to some of the partners, you kind of get the inside baseball. You don't have to reveal any secrets, but what are we expecting to see in Atlanta? Cage match, Love Fest, customer testimonials, what are we going to see? So we're all working towards the last, right? And my expectation is, in those technologies, we are absolutely seeing customer adoption pretty rapidly, so that's a great thing. And we will have some customers that start to stand up and say, not only are we trying this out, but we're using it, right? Production grade type stuff. My expectation is that we'll probably see some cool announcements from our partners and from Red Hat and kind of more of the mesh, less of the cage match, more of the Love Fest. But I think some clear- So meet on the bone, meet on the bone with reference accounts and whatnot. And really, how do we take the enterprise-grade knowledge that we've done with Linux and make that enterprise grade for all the new stuff? Scott, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Global Alliance is at Red Hat. You got a tough job. It's a complicated world, but that's the world we live in. Innovation, open source. This is theCUBE, documenting it all right here. Live in San Francisco at the Red Hat Summit. We'll be right back after this short break. Thank you.