 Welcome to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco, California. We're here at Google Next. I'm John Furrier, co-host with Rob Streche. Got to the Kirkland, Lisa and Marvin. Four hosts today getting all the action. They're out getting the stories. We've got a great segment here about how the ecosystem in Google Next is exploding. Obviously, we could have two sets as more people want to come on. Then we have seeds. We've got two great guests here. Blake Chivir, Vice President of Global. Cloud for partners at Red Hat and Clive DeSosa. Head of Partner Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. We were just ripping about the AI greatness. Great to have you guys on. Yeah, thank you. Congratulations. Thank you for having us. So, Red Hat, you guys always had great open source mojo and that open source is really a big part of the AI. We want to get to that. Google, congratulations on a great first keynote. The demos are fantastic. It's just mind blowing to see how you can collect first party stuff and then have AI do something different that's actionable. It's just, it's a moment I think where it's like it's crossing over and you've got a lot of legit, integrate hard problem solving. So, congratulations on that. Thank you. Anyway, so thanks for coming on. We'll get into some of that. The big thing that we've been talking about in our first segment was on the keynote review was the ecosystem. You guys are getting another shot at the Apple here, so to speak, with the ecosystems booming. Really interesting time and Red Hat have been a great partner. You guys got some news to share here about Red Hat partnership and Google. Let's get right to the news. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, should I share the news or should you share it? Of course. It's all you. We are so proud. We won partner of the year for infrastructure from Google this year and we've been working so hard just to bring this partnership to the next level for our customers and Clive and the rest of the people at Google that we've been working with it's just been so validating to get that award this year. So thank you. Thank you for that. It's just more of the customers to be honest. I mean, the way we look at it and we always try, if you look at Red Hat, it's not just the operating system. We look at Ansible, we look at OpenShift and all of that and purely from a platform perspective, it's where the customers are, where we want to meet them on the journey as they come to the cloud. So for us, that's the validation and we're fortunate to have Red Hat as one of our partners. Yeah, thank you. I agree. Yeah. And what's some of the main things that jumped out on the award? Was it the simplicity of the solutions? Because we're seeing a lot of solutions. Rob and I were referring that it's not so much about all the services that Google has. The solutions that are out there. And you've got the DevOps market going DevSecOps now. I call it data ops or data engineering or data developer emerging. A new persona is coming. What's the reasons for the partnership award? What were some of the highlights? Well, I think Clive said it best. We've really put the customer experience at the center of this, right? So if we have a really good customer experience when you're procuring whatever software you need to run your cloud vision and your cloud mission on and then while you're building that and what you're delivering on that, if we're creating value for our customers and for their customers, that's what's bringing us together on this. So honestly, I think it's just putting the customer in the center and focusing on how do we make that experience just as good as possible. That has brought Red Hat and Google and the two ecosystems that we both have together for that common cause. Yeah, and just to do a plus one on that, one of the things which we appreciate about how Red Hat is moving, when you look at how they're embracing the generated AI. And if you look at Ansible and the adapters and plugins they're putting in, at the end of the day, what really matters to developers is to develop productivity. And the way you can integrate more and more of the technology and make the productivity better, that's what we're seeing a lot more in terms of adoption also. It's one of the personal victories of doing theCUBE, Bravo, but 13 years as you see everything. And I'll never forget my first Ansible Fest many, many years ago when Red Hat bought Ansible. It's like this corner, I mean, I've loved configuration, man. I'm kind of weird like that, but I love DevOps. But Ansible was a tell sign of what was coming with automation. And since then that's a nice ground game into the goodness of what AI is delivering in terms of what's abstracting away with the data. So the key story now is AI, but really starts with automation, getting things platformed out properly and making that's the DevOps journey. But now as we go to the next level there's so much change happening. How do you guys look at that partnership? Because if I'm the customer, I got to be thinking myself, do I choose this or that? Or if I pick Lang chain, if I go this way, it's like, there's a lot of greatness and goodness coming, but there's also a lot of choice and I will say complexity, but like path decisions. Will I be over my skis if I go down this road? So there's a lot of ease of use is easy to say, but like ease of choice from a customer standpoint. I can take a stab at it. So when you look at Vortex AI and the Vortex AI extensions we announced today, it's not only what Google has brought to bear in the market. That's the first party. It includes open source and third party offerings. But when you look at a developer's experience today from an IDE and how they are deploying something in the environment, I think from a compliance perspective, from a security perspective, from a best practice perspective, if those are already vetted and they're continually tested on the Vortex AI extensions which are plumbed in, the developers never have to worry that hey, am I deploying the right architecture, the right version of opening system, the right version of Ansible on my platform. And that comes in because you have that in real time being checked for you. So in many ways those guardrails are fixed. To a certain extent the choice also is very prescriptive which matters in migrations where you need to have an opinionated view and you bring it to the market, right? And so in many ways we are also handling that, making sure that data is secure, the environment is compliant and you adhere to the governance and best practices. I mean I would love to get your point of view on that. Yeah, so I think that if you think about Red Hat's portfolio working with Google here where we've got Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the base, we've got OpenShift as the sort of industry leading development platform and an app platform and then Ansible to automate. Those are the three basic simple things. They're all, they're governed, they're built with open source. So they're tested by a community and those are the three basic things that a customer actually needs so that they can go take something like advanced AI services that are coming out from Google and quickly bring those to market to create value for their business. So if they standardize on a real trusted open source platform like Red Hat, they can get the value out of these higher level AI type tools a lot quicker. Trust, yeah. The key word is trust. The key word is trust. And making sure that as you build those new things that you can get them out fast and that they're going to run and they're going to have good uptime and create a good experience for their customers and that's what we're majoring on together. Yeah. I mean, they have a relationship with Red Hat. Your customers have a trust relationship with Red Hat and you are a proxy to all the underlying things you're doing for them. It's like a phone and a contract with the carrier. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on under the covers, but you're the point of contact. Yeah, that's very true. And something that to me is really interesting about the trust and the open source model. Red Hat is representing that trust layer but what's holding us accountable is an entire multi-million contributor open source ecosystem that is a part of that. So it's not just one company that's given a guarantee to Google and all of Google's clients that we're going to be trustworthy. We have to be trustworthy to the entire community. We have to be trustworthy to all of open source. And that is what I think really gives that sort of extra depth in the stamp of trust that Red Hat brings to that. And when you build that from the developer mindset or the IP is a really big hot topic, right? Bleeding over of any GPL V3, or into BST and what have you, there are now mechanisms built in with Vertex, with, do it AI into the ID where you can check for if IP is bleeding over and you can do digital fingerprinting to ensure that, hey, is this code coming from open source? Is it coming from my repo? And you have that level of provenance of built into your system. So in many, many ways, the trust value chain is even strengthened, right? So as long as we have that governance laid out. I think that's the interesting, you are the two OGs of open source for Kubernetes. To put it mildly, I mean you go to Coupon and we were both there talking about the data engineering and looking at platform engineering in general. I think that your Dora report is out and being filled out now and it will be probably published pretty soon. And that's like the OG report on key metrics for developers. I read it every year. I've done different broadcasts on it. I think what's interesting and definitely your perspective because you're both OGs in AI as well. Now that Red Hat is part of the whole Watson X portfolio with the OpenShift data science platforms, it would seem that it gives a lot of choice to your joint customers about how they bring things to a multi-cloud environment. Is that where you're seeing a lot of this coming from? Is that, hey, we're trying to help people get to that multi-cloud environment. I mean, you guys are on other clouds as well. But I mean, again, winning partner of the year, it's got to be growing pretty nicely here as well. I could take the first crack at that if you want. I think that Clive said it earlier, moving something to the cloud, all the stuff that you're talking about, taking advantage of AI, it sounds great. And we see a demo on stage and it blows our mind. It's hard to do, it's extremely hard to do. So the more friction that we can remove from that, the more decisions that we can just make at the infrastructure layer that are, again, trusted decisions based on open source principles that ultimately help that customer take their energy and their very valuable talent resources and apply them to the top of the stack with that AI vision. How do I bring that to life? That's going to go quicker for them. So that's what we're trying to do at the end of the day. We want to remove that friction. We want to be that standard trusted platform and say, let's bring out those sparks of innovation at higher levels in your business. There is a multi-cloud component to it. There's an on-premise component in the cloud, a hybrid component as well too. A lot of this stuff starts on-premise and then moves into the cloud. Making that easier than you could ever possibly imagine, that's what we ultimately envision and want to do. And that multi-cloud or super cloud, as we call it, is the apps are going to run across those environments. I mean, it's a distributed computing basically. So, okay, we get that. As the apps come out, that's going to be the interesting piece. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys see your joint customers' needs. So I buy the trust. It's a great way to start with Red Hat and Google Cloud. I see that. But then what happens next? It's going to be like, okay, I've got to solve problems. And that duet demo on stage where all those alerts come in and then AI just solves it. Duet button. I mean, that's pretty, that's scaling automation to a level that's unprecedented. So we see that. It's mind blowing. Client's going to want that immediately. What do you guys see as the joint needs now? And how does that translate going forward? Because I'm sure there's going to be some platform engineers going to get done. Apps shift left for security, but also, where do you shift for the data? Where do you shift for AI? How does that get built into the data developer? So a couple of things, right? In the grand scheme of things, as it migrates from on-prem to go hybrid to the cloud, we always say the same thing. Customers do not migrate infrastructure. They migrate applications. And that draws a whole bunch of the entire portfolio with that. Now as it relates to AI, AI is going to be ubiquitous. That is just the nature of the beast. Be it in DevSecOps, be it in operations, be it in product management, be it be even SRE, that's where you mentioned the alerts come in. Where we are seeing is that from a pure productivity perspective, from an operational burden perspective, all of that is shifting up. It is going to become a core ingredient, API level integration, not just at which is the best operating system for me, but which is the best compute shape for me. How am I deploying it? Where is my region which is, you know, spiking up, not where do I do a burst to the cloud? This is where we see the industry moving. As it relates to, we always repeat this. When you're moving to the cloud, you don't want to tear out what you have on-prem. You got to do it in a very methodical manner. You got to do it in a structured manner. And AI gives you those guardrails, right? If you look at Google's history and how we are rolling out our APIs, how we are rolling out all our services, they're very deliberate. We are not in favor of speed. We don't want to go and hit the wall really hard and then pay the consequences for that. It is very thoughtful, it's very deliberate, and just launched 38 new languages. Now we have over 100 languages support on Vertex AI. And that's all part of, you know, you want the developers to be able to have that market language conversation with the idea and do it. That's where it's going. The developer is going to start interacting with the entire ID, almost like a paired programming model. And that integrates everything you need as a default on the box. No, no, absolutely. I mean, I couldn't say it. I couldn't say it better. It's going to certainly accelerate and change open source as we know it. It's going to radically increase more code, more, probably more efficiency actually. Think about some of the code efficiency. For sure. I mean, all the action in AI right now is, from a developer's perspective, is open source. It's not getting enough press, but it's booming. Open source means a lot of things happening in the open. Right now, in the long tail of these models, certainly the AI side we're seeing, should be a game changer. Yeah, I think so. It is already changing the game. It's already changing the game. And I think giving those customers choice is really important, and to your point, open source is such an interesting model based on curiosity and solving problems. Isn't that what it's all about at the end of the day? We want to be able to unleash that. So anyway. Yeah, and it seems like there's a lot of innovation going on in both platforms that can be paired together. And that has to be kind of one of the themes for the joint customers is, hey, bring it here this way, and we can help accelerate that for you. Well, let's bring it here however you need to. We're going to accelerate it for you, right? I mean, we want to be very adaptable to what that client needs. And we really, we didn't talk about marketplace at all, but it also comes down to how do you buy the software? How do you actually procure and get the software? How do we make that just really easy? Remove time from these cycles that are just energy vampires in terms of helping to get to whatever your business mission and objectives are. Take that off the equation. Ansible, Linux, OpenShift, they're all available in the Google Marketplace. Boom, let's create a standard platform, quickly migrate those workloads and allow you to start getting the full value out of AI in ways, again, that you couldn't have ever previously imagined. I was going to get to that question around how customers can take that journey with you guys together, Red Hat and Google, because what you're getting at is, okay, I'm the customer, okay, you check the boxes, AI on the problems you guys saw, okay, compliance. By the way, compliance has always been a dragging anchor to innovation and data. Got to have siloed now with embeddings and extensions, very interesting things you can do with data. Okay, now data is horizontally scalable. Thank you very much, Cloud. Now I got to get apps out there so I can check, check, check. Okay, I'm a customer. How do I get started? I like the trust, sold me on that. How do I span my journey with you guys? What's the solution? When you look at the cloud in general, I always tell people, you know, your data center can be managed by the 20-inch monitor in front of you from a compliance and procurement perspective. You have well-voted ISVs. You have well-defined blueprints which come from either the Google Cloud Marketplace which can come into the Google Cloud Marketplace and you can deploy it in your environment without having the hassle of going to the procurement group, getting your cost charge back, center set up, getting your projects set up, waiting on weeks, sometimes months, but all of this literally is click, deploy and you're in your environment. And you know for a fact that whatever is getting deployed is compliant as all the policies, VBGDPR, VBCCPA, VBITAR is compliant. And these are the security best practice for your organization, right? So that all that thinking which I call it as developer overhead is removed. You go to productivity right away. Developers should not have to worry about is this the right version or am I going to get into trouble for that? It should be, I want to deploy well with Ansible on the backend of AlloyDB and I want to have it on-prem as well as the cloud AlloyDB Omni. And here is how I'm going to do it. And by the way, I want a whole bunch of generic embeddings in it. What is the right environment for me? The entire portfolio can now be deployed and it just click and deploy the environment. That is where the industry is heading. And you can burn down the credits without having to worry about anything in the backend. It's all tied in. And you guys do a great job there. One of the things that Red Hat's done really well over the past decade is, you know the OpenShift was kind of a great stroke of genius how you guys rode that way, beautiful. I love the Ansible as you know. Earlier I mentioned that. Obviously a fan of Red Hat. Is that you guys nailed the open source and scale that up. Now it's run fast and scale up. Because AI is going to allow for accelerated product market fit. So I'm expecting developers to start. And enterprise start hitting some new products. New apps are going to hit the scene. So with Red Hat, how do I get on board? What are you guys, what solution do you recommend? How does the customer get engaged with you guys? Obviously Marketplace, take us through the playbook. I'm a customer. How do I onboard with Red Hat and Google Cloud? Yeah, so here's the thing about Marketplace. It doesn't require a lot of explanation. It's like the first time that you went online shopping. You just bought the thing and it showed up at your door, right? It's about that simple. What's unique about Red Hat in this equation is if you've got Red Hat on-premise or you're already doing some business with Red Hat and you have a lot of workloads running and you want to do some stuff in Marketplace and you want to enter into the cloud world. You make the purchase in both places. All the software works together. It doesn't matter where it's running. It doesn't matter if it's on-premise, if it's in a cloud or if it's even on an edge. Everything's going to look like one control plane to you as a customer. But that stuff that you buy in the Marketplace is going to be much easier to procure and to buy and to go from time to value from when I buy it to when I can actually turn it on and start running an app on it. Like it's almost instantaneous, which is unheard of. I mean, enterprise software, I remember you buy the app, you get the CD, a person comes and installs the CD in the thing. There's some debugging and like two weeks later you got something. It's literally buy, click, and go. Now we do private offers, so if you already have an existing relationship with Red Hat or you want to commit to something and get a discount, we have the ability to do private offers to accommodate that for customers. And like Clive said, if you've already got a spin commitment with Google and you purchase this way, it's also going to count against your spin commitment to Google. So for any CFO that accidentally dialed in and is listening to this right now, that's a huge value proposition for you along with the risk, mitigation, and compliance things that we've talked about so far. Two customers deploying Ansible, OpenShift, and obviously, RHEL, right? And the one thing- Yes, exactly. All of that is available directly on Google Marketplace. And the one thing which Blake, we talked about briefly is the enterprise support. Because if you have support, and by the way, it's a really big deal for large infrastructure deployments and migrations. If we have the support of Red Hat on-prem and you move to the cloud, it's a warm handoff between Google and Red Hat. It's not, this is your problem, Red Hat, but so this is your problem, Google. We actually have a very tight integration at the ticketing level, right? And that's how the tickets are handled. Blake, Clive, great to have you on. Congratulations on partner of the year, Red Hat. Well deserved. Thank you. Congratulations on all of your continued success. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having us. It's been awesome. And thank you, Clive, for being such an awesome partner. Oh, thank you, my pleasure. Thank you for having us. Final question, what do you guys do next? How do you top partner of the year? Get it again, repeat, repeat. What's next in the partnership? What are you guys going to work on? Take us through the roadmap. I love how Clive framed this earlier. Partner of the year is just an outcome, right? We're focused on the customer. We're focused on delivering the customer value. I really want to see what innovations come out of, when we truly enable that, when we truly create that. What are the amazing innovations that come out of this? How do we take these basic tools that we've put together and construct them into things that are just going to change our lives in ways that we don't even know yet? That, to me, is the next step and that's what I'm really focused on. Clive, I mean, when you look at, excuse me, when you look at Red Hat and where they are today, for that matter, any ISV, the generative AI in and of itself is literally in its infancy, we're just taking off. Where we are going to see the most innovation, the delamination happening between the market leaders and the innovators, is how quickly they adapt to it. When you have that very prescriptive, very well thought out, what's your AI strategy, how I'm going to get it into my stack, that's where we'll start seeing the market leaders fall. I think next year, by this time, I expect to see vendors like Red Hat, if I may say, having much more rich integration and actually having and leading the actual, the human interaction, the engagement model, completely different. In an area, in a ballpark, in a plane, maybe you've not even seen, right? And that's what we expect to see. It's not just making a better mouse trap, to be honest. It's going to be the next level, technology. It's about the roadmap. You guys doing a great job on that. I think all this points to that. You got startups and enterprises, both of you guys doing a great job. You know, get the developers, code in the apps, get the infrastructure to support it, get the solutions, and the ecosystem, the trifecta. That's right. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for coming on, guys. Appreciate it. Okay, we've got more coverage here. Day one, two and a half days of live journalism. John Furrier with Rob Stretcher. We'll be right back after this short break.