 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE, continuing coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2019. Day three of our three days of coverage, some 9,000 attendees, great keynotes, great educational sessions, and a couple of great guests for you. Stu Miniman, John Walls, we're joined by Marco Bill Peter, who is the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and Engagement at Red Hat. Good to see you, Marco. Thanks for having me. Good job on the keynote stage this morning. And Dr. Christoph Beck, who is the Head of IT Infrastructure from Hilti. And Christoph, thank you for being here as well. Thank you. Hailing from Lichtenstein, and we think you're the first guest alum. We're about to check our database, but we've set a new record today, so thanks for adding to our history. Thanks for having me. First off, let's talk about Hilti. I'm sure people at home say Hilti, I've seen them, but this building probably wouldn't be here without you. Imagine half the city wouldn't be here without you, but just tell folks at home Hilti a little bit about where you fit into the construction world. Hilti was founded in the 1940s in Principality of Lichtenstein, and is now today a leading supplier for the construction industry. We provide tools, consumables, services, and software solutions for professional construction companies. That is from hammer drills to anchors to calculation software and overall complete services for the industry. That's what Hilti's doing. So you did a very good job this morning on the keynote of painting that picture about the scope of your work and the necessity of your work, the vitality of it, because construction projects, as we all know, have very strict deadlines. Sometimes they have unique needs, they have immediate needs, emergency needs, and you're at the center of all that, so your technology is central to your general operation. Absolutely, yes. I mean, with 25,000 or 29,000 employees, 25,000 users in our SAP system, basically everybody's using every day SAP or the vast majority of the users. We have 10,000 concurrent users every day on our system that deal with customer requests, with orders, with quotes, but also of course with complaints, with repair handling and so on and so forth. Just a few. Yeah, just a few. So Marco, I hear SAP and brings me back to when, oh well, Linux was that stuff that sat on little sidelines, we're well past that. You've got so many customers that run their business, mission critical around the globe, just give us a little bit of background on the partnership with Hilti and Red Hat and solutions like SAP. Yes, sure, yeah. The partnership with Hilti goes back to, I think, 2007. For me personally, I started working with Hilti from another company in 93. So I know actually Hilti quite well. I actually studied in the same town next to Liechtenstein. So I know them well. And it's amazing to see the journey kind of 2009 going all SAP mission critical on REL and now actually they move to SAP S4HANA. And yes, Hilti is one of the clients, but it kind of talks that we can handle these mission critical applications and mission critical customers and build this good relationship to make sure they have this courage to actually do these bold jumps like they did the last six months. So Christoph, you've got a broad role at the company. We talked to so many companies. I'm becoming a tech company, I'm becoming a software company. Well, software is critical, but at the end of the day, infrastructure and running your business is core. You're not going to become a fully digital software. You have real stuff in the physical world that lots of people and lots of physical things that need to go. Talk a little bit about that balance and how the company's been changing over those last 10 years. I was excited to be open with you. I was really excited when our executive board a couple of years ago, besides tools, consumables and services, also added software into a strategic pillar for Hilti. And while I believe that software will be an interesting pillar for us, will generate additional revenue, will generate additional sales, primarily also in the consumables and tools and services piece, software becomes more and more important when you look at the journey of building a building like this, as you mentioned, John. I mean, it starts with specifying, it starts with the planning on CAD and it ends at the end with asset management, where are the tools and so on. So it's a complete life cycle throughout the building and throughout the construction of a building. You know, Marco mentioned that you made this decision to migrate to HANA last year, right? 2018 or you started last year. You actually did it last year, decision made before that. Talk about that a little bit, if you would please. And where Red Hat fit into that because that's not a small decision, right? I mean, that's a very calculated and I wouldn't, not risky, but it's just a big move. And so the confidence that you had as well that Red Hat was your partner to make that happen. Absolutely. I mean, the announcement of SAP to support HANA as the only database after 2025 was one of the factors to push us into that direction. That was then clear for us that we want to go there. And it was also pretty clear for us that in our size, it was not that easy to move in 2023 or something like that in that direction, but that we have to be the first movers to be fully supported by SAP and all these partners because later on they will be busy with migrating all the big shots. So we took the decision to move first and soon and that allowed us to be in the focus of all these attached partners, SAP, but also Red Hat, also Dell EMC for storage and HP for servers. That meant that we had confidence, that we had full attention from all these providers and partners to help us to migrate. On the other hand, it was clear the journey we started in 2009 as indicated by Marco that we moved to an open software that we moved to commodity hardware, Intel-based server hardware, was a move that had paid off in the past and we didn't want to go away from that and move again to a proprietary hardware or software solution. So it was very clear that we want to do that jointly with Red Hat on commodity and Intel-based servers and that's how we went there. All right, so Christoph, big theme we hear not only at this show, but almost every show we go to is today, customers, it's the hybrid and multi-cloud world. I see SAP at all of the big cloud shows that we cover. Where does cloud fit into your overall discussion at your company and then we can drill down to the specifics of SAP and Red Hat, but do you have a cloud strategy as it were? Oh yes, we moved fairly soon to Amazon with all our customer-facing workload. So when you go to hilti.com or any of our webpages, you typically land on an AWS-powered website because that one gave us the flexibility of operating systems of databases, of whatever we needed that was available there. With our internal workload, however, so all the software we use internally to run the company, we have a world that is split between SAP, which runs entirely on Red Hat, and the rest of the workload, which is to a large degree Windows-based workload. So there we decided a few years ago to move into Microsoft's Azure platform to move the internal workload into Azure as it is mainly Windows-based. So Marco, I actually want to depart from hilti for a second, just give us a little bit of a broad view. We've talked to you many times, you talked about this age, the customer experience is a critical piece of Red Hat's mission out there. When I talk to customers today, one of the biggest changes they've seen the last few years is I'm managing a lot of stuff that's not in my environment. It's the stuff I'm responsible for it, and if something goes wrong, I'm absolutely getting the call, but it's not my network, it's not my servers, it's not my piece there, but I have to do all of them. I've got to imagine that's been a transformation for Red Hat and the partnerships, and you're everywhere, so it just gives us a little context. You describe it very well. I think the last two years, before I think it was just like some use cases in the public cloud, but today the hybrid cloud is here, then everybody does it, it's not just one company. From a customer experience to staying behind, like I mentioned on the stage, it gets harder, and you've got to have these partnerships. One partnership, we can talk about the Azure, we have people in Redmond, think about it. Today everything changed with Satya having on stage here, but we have support people in Microsoft for the last two or three years. Same with SAP as an example, we have people, we actually build a fairly large team in Waldorf to be closer with them together, and to do that, be it the SAP Cloud, be it on regular workloads as well. In general, yes, the challenges, you mentioned networking, it gets trickier, and it shifts it from, but it's unavoidable, it shifts it from, okay, we own and control the stack, to yes, you need to know your open source software and to have really partnerships, right? And I think the announcement with Microsoft to have this managed services offering that we do jointly, that's what we're driving to, so that we can do this better together with partners. So, Marco, it's great to hear you that, but Christoph, he's not listening. Tell us the reality, you've worked with Red Hat for 10 years, you're going to Cloud, how are they doing? How's the ecosystem, the vendors in general, they're all up on stage holding hands. I mean, it's seamless, nobody ever points fingers, I'm sure. To be very, very honest with you, I mean, I appreciated last year hearing that Red Hat will be offered in Azure. I mean, that was not possible to mention those two company names in one sentence in the past, at least for us as customers. And that was a bold statement last year, that those two parties will suddenly join. That fits very well in our strategy, because we believe internal workload for Hilti should run in Azure. Seeing on last Tuesday, Microsoft and Red Hat shaking hands and moving even beyond that one was for me almost the most exciting event here, or the most exciting statement that I saw here during these few days, because that re-emphasized the close relationship that those two have, and that exactly fits our roadmap. That's exciting for us. We heard that, again, from both CEOs, saying customers really kind of brought us together. They made this deal work, because we kept hearing that they love us, and they love you, and they like us together. So we got that, we understand that. So Marco, customers drove that to a certain degree. You've got a customer here who made this big Hanajump, which is, you know, you say, small guy, you know, I would beg to differ a little bit that you got him before the big guy instead. But what, like an initiative like that, what is that doing for you at Red Hat in terms of carrying that over to other customers? Now, you've learned from one. You've seen what they've gone through. What kind of confidence does that give you? What kind of interest does that give you about how to approach this kind of move? Absolutely, yeah. You know what we learned from, give you one example, right? If you move these Hanaj up close, right? Christopher Hilty uses systems with 12 terabytes memory. Think about it. That's a fairly large system. And that footprint, right? To actually test our software with that footprint and then even think about the next journey as in, if you want to do this in the cloud, what does that mean? If you take a 12 terabyte image and run it in AWS. And so that is, since my team also does quality assurance and product security, that's for them as well as in, okay, we've seen what Hilty can do, it worked, and how do we actually make this more robust? How do we test new hardware? And how do we do that in this journey? I think I'm pretty proud on how we actually learn from these instances. And Hilty is not the only one, it's just one that's public. But yeah, it's every time, I think that you only survive this industry if you really learn continuously and also apply it, right? I mean, our whole setup involved or we shifted completely, and not just from the people we have there. So we have people that do open shift there. We have people do Linux and performance. But also from structure, to really be sure that we are set up for success and know what the next wave of customers is. Obviously every customer from SAP will do, will go through a journey like this over the next 10 years. So, Kristoff, obviously being on stage is good for the company, but coming to Red Hat Summit, why don't you just give our audience that if they hadn't come to it, some of the value as to what you place and some of the activities that have excited you most here this week? I mean, one thing is of course, hearing about latest technologies, new releases of software, of new possibilities and opportunities for us as customers from Red Hat. But also it's great to see how on the floor out there, other partners, customers and vendors mingle around the ecosystem that was created around open software about not only an operating system, but also about containers, about all those different technologies which have an important role for all of us in IT in the future. Sure. Well, good week. That's for sure. Very nice job again on the keynote stage. To both of you and good luck with the partnership on down the road. And again, I would beg the differing, you said us, we little guys got in early and Hilti's no small fry in your world. That's for sure. Thanks for the time, Kristoff. Marco. Thank you. Thank you very much. Back with more. We're live here in Boston and we're covering the Red Hat Summit 2019 on the queue.