 Hey everyone, welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is live on the floor at AnsibleFest 2022, the first in-person Ansible event that we've covered since 2019. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, great to be here. There's about 1400 to 1500 people here in person. The partner ecosystem is growing and evolving and that's going to be one of the themes of our next conversation. Cloud scale is continuing to change the ecosystem and this segment with AWS is going to be awesome. Exactly, we've got one of our alumni back with us, Stephanie Cheers joins us again. Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystems Success at Red Hat and Mansi Jagannatha is also here, Global Alliance Manager at AWS. Ladies, welcome to the program. Thank you. Nice to be here. So some exciting news that came out. First of all, it was great to see you on stage. Thank you. In front of a live audience, the community is, you talked about this before, we went live, that Ansible is nothing if not the community. So I can only imagine how great that felt to be on stage in front of the live bodies, announcing the next step with Ansible and AWS. Tell us about that. I mean, you can't compete with the energy that comes from a live event. And I remember the first Ansible Fest I came to, it's just this electric feeling born out of the community, born out of collaboration and getting together feeds that collaboration in a way that nothing, like nothing else. Can't do it by video alone. You cannot. And so it was so fun because today was big news. We announced that Ansible will be available through the AWS marketplace, the next step in our partnership journey. And we've been hearing like most of our announcements, we do these because customers ask for them. And that's really what is key. And the combination of what Red Hat brings to the table and what AWS brings to the table, that's what underpins this announcement this morning. Talk about it from a customer demand perspective and how you're not only meeting customers where they are, but you're speaking their language. Yeah. There's a couple of aspects. And then I want to pass it to Monzi because nothing speaks better than a customer experience. But the specifics I think of what come together is this is where technology, procurement experience, accessibility all come together. And it took both of us in order to do that. But we actually talked about a great example today. The TransUnion. So we have TransUnion. They are a credit reporting company and they're a joint customer. They use REL, they use AWS services. So while they were transitioning to the cloud, the first thing they wanted to know was compliance, right? Like how do we have guardrails around compliance? That was a key feature for them. And then the other piece was how do we scale without increasing the complexity? And then the critical piece was, being able to integrate with the depth of AWS services without having to do it over and over again. So what TransUnion did was they basically integrated Ansible Automation Platform with the AWS Cloud Control API that gave them the flexibility to basically integrate with what, 200 plus services. And it's amazing to see them grow over time. You know, what's interesting is that Amazon, obviously cloud has been awesome. We've been covering it since the beginning. DevOps infrastructure as code was the dream. Now it's, Alps says code, you have configuration code before that. As cloud goes next level here, we're starting to see a lot more higher level services on AWS being adopted by customers. And so I want to get into how the marketplace deal works. So what's in it for the customer? Because as they bring Ansible across the enterprise and Edge now, we're seeing that develop. If I'm the customer, am I buying it through the marketplace? What's the mechanics of the deal? Can I just tap into the bill, explain the marketplace workflow or how it works? I'd love to do that. So customers come to the marketplace for three key benefits, right? Like one is the consumption based model. Pay as you go. You can get hourly, annual and spot instances. For some services, you even get per second billing, right? Like that's amazing. That's one. And then the other pieces, John and Stephanie, as you know, customers would love to draw down on their EDPs, right? Like they want a single- EDPs, explain that with acronym. It's enterprise discount program. So they want a single bill where they can use third party services and AWS services. And they don't have to go through the hassle of saying, hey, let me combine all these different pieces. So combining that, and of course the power of Ansible, right? Like customers love Ansible. They've built playbooks. The beauty of it is, whatever you want to build on AWS, there is most likely a playbook or a module that already exists. So they can just tap into that and build into the AWS. And operationally, it's purchasing through marketplace. And you know, I mean, being an engineer myself, we always often get caught up in the technology aspect, like what's the greatest technology? And everyone, as Muncie said, everyone loves the technology of Ansible, but the procurement aspect is also so important. And this is where I think this partnership really comes together. It is natively, Ansible is now natively integrated into AWS billing, so one bill. You go and you log in. Now you have a Red Hat subscription. You get all the benefits from Red Hat that comes along with that subscription. But Ansible is all about simplicity. This brings simplicity to that procurement model, and it allows you to scale within your AWS cloud environment that you have set up. And as Muncie mentioned, pull in those other native services from AWS. It's great. It's interesting. One of the things that Buzzword, Lisa and I were just talking in the industry is the word multiplayer. I've heard people say, that's multiplayer software kind of a gaming analogy. But what you guys are doing is setting up, once they go with Ansible in the marketplace, they're just buying as things get more collaborative off the marketplace. So they kind of streamline, if I get this right, the purchasing process. So they're already in, they just use it, it's on the bill. Is that kind of how it works? Absolutely done, yeah. So the customer has a partnership with us, more on the technology side in this particular case, and with AWS and the procurement side. It brings that together. So multiplayer software, is it multiplayer software? We like to talk about multi-partner solutions. And I think this provides a new grounding for other partners to come in and build upon that with their services capabilities, with their other technology capabilities. So we, well, clearly in my world, we talk about multi-partner. Well, what you're doing is empowering the developers. I know that Red Hat has one of its goals, is let's make things much more seamless, much smoother for the developers. As the buyer's journey has changed, and John, you've talked about that quite a bit, you're empowering those buyers to actually have a much simpler streamlined process, and to be able to start seeing automation become democratized across organizations. Yeah. And one of the things I love about the announcement as well is it pulls in the other values of Ansible Automation Platform in that simplicity model that you mentioned with, like things like certified collections. Certified collections that have been built by partners. We have built certified collections to go along with this offering as well as part of the AWS offering. That pulls in these other partner engagements together. And as you said, democratize is not only what we've done together, but what we've done with other partners together. Right. Yeah. What are, can you kind of talk kind of about the depths of the partnership, the co-engineering, and sort of the evolution, and the customer involvement in the expansion of the partnership. I'd love to walk you through that. So we've had a long standing partnership coming up on 15 years now, Stephanie. Can you believe it? I know. 15 years we've been building to give you some historical context, right? And back in 2008, we launched REL. And in 2015, we supported SAP Workloads on REL. And then the list goes on, right? Like we've been launching Graviton instances, ARM instances, Nitro. The key to be noted here is that every new instance launched, REL has always been supported on day one, right? Like that's been our motto. So that's one. And then in 2021, as you know, we launched Rosa Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. And that's helped customers with their modernization journey to AWS. So that's been context historically around where we were and where we are today. And now with Ansible, it just gives customer another tool in their arsenal, right? And then the goal is to make sure we meet customers where they are, give them all the Red Hat products that they love using on their hybrid workloads. Sounds like a lot is coming, maybe a re-invent too, coming up. Yeah. What's next? This is the beginning, right? We'll continue to grow based upon not only laying the building blocks for what customers can build with, and you mentioned Lisa, right? We follow this journey that Monsi talked about because of what customers ask for. So it's always a new adventure to determine what'll come next based upon what we hear from our joint customers. On that front though, Stephanie, talk about the impact of the broader ecosystem that this is just scratching the surface. One of the things, and we've been going through a whole transformation at Red Hat about how we engage with the ecosystem. We've done organizational shifts. We've done really a complete revamp of how we engage with the ecosystem. One of our biggest focus is to make sure that the partnerships that we have with one partner bring value to the rest of our partners. No better example than something like this. When we work with AWS to create accessibility and capability through a procurement model that we know is important to customers, but that then serves as a launch point for other partners to build certified collections around or now around validated content, which we talked about today at Ansible Fest. That allows other partners to engage and we're seeing a huge amount in services partners, right? Automation is so pervasive now as customers want to go out and scale. We're seeing services partners really come in and help customers go from, it's always challenging when you have a broad set of IT, you have cloud native over here, you have bare metal over here, you have virtual. It's complex. There's sometimes an energy activation barrier to get over that initial automation. We're seeing partners come in with really skilled services capabilities to help customers get over that hump to consolidate with an automation plan. It gets them better equipped to do day one automation and day two automation. And that's where Ansible Automation Platform is going. It's not just about configuration management, it's about day two management as well. Talk about those barriers a little bit more and how Ansible and AWS together are helping customers really knock those out of the park and then they'll baseball reference for you. If you know, we see that a lot of organizations, the skills gap, which we've talked about already on the conversation today, but Ansible is being a facilitator of helping organizations to attract talent, to retain talent, but also customers that maybe don't know where to start or don't know how to determine the ROI that automating processes will bring. How can this partnership help customers knock those out of the park? So I'll start and then I'll pass it to Mansi here, but I think one of the key things in this particular partnership is just plain old accessibility. Accessibility, which Public Cloud has taught the world a new way to get fast access, that consumption-based pricing. You can get your hands on it, you can test it out, you can have a team go in and test it out and then you can see it's built for scale. So then you can scale it as far as you want to go forward. We clearly have an ecosystem of services partners, so does AWS, to help people then sort of take it to the next level as they want to build upon it, but to me the first step is about accessibility, getting your hands dirty. You can build it into those committed spend programs that you may have with AWS as well to try new things, but it's a great test bed. Absolutely, and then to add to what Stephanie said, together Red Hat and AWS, we have about 100,000 partners combined, like resellers, SIs, GSIs, distributors. So the reach that the combined partnership has just amplifies. It's huge news, I think it's a big deal because you operationalized the heavy lifting of procurement for all your joint customers and the scale piece is huge. So congratulations, I think it's going to make a lot of money for Ansible, so good call there. My question is, as we hear here, the next level's edge. So AWS has been doing a ton of hybrid since outpost announcement years ago. Now you've got all kinds of regional expansions, you've got local zones, you've got all kinds of new edge activity. So are there dots connecting here with Edge, with Red Hat and Ansible? Do you want to? Yeah, so I think we see two trends with our customers, right, like mainly I'm specifically talking about our real customer base on AWS. We have almost hundreds to thousands of customers using RHEL on AWS. These are 90% of Fortune 500 companies use RHEL, right? So with that customer base, they are looking to expand to your point into the Edge, there's outposts, there are so many hybrid environments that they're trying to expand in. So just adding Ansible, RHEL, Rosa, OpenShift, that entire mix just gives customers that the plethora of products they need to run their workloads everywhere, right? Like we have certifications without post, we have certifications with OpenShift, right? So it just completes the puzzle, if you may say. So it's a nice fit. Yeah. It is a really nice fit and, you know, I love Edge, and Edge, once you start going distributed, this automation aspect is key for all the reasons, for security reasons, to make sure you do it the same way every single time. It's just pervasive in it, but things like the Cloud Control API allow it to bridge into things like outposts, it allows a simple way, one clean way to do API, and then you can expand it out and get the value. So this is why you were on stage and you said that Ansible is going to expand the scope to be more enterprise architecture. That's essentially what you're getting at. This is now a distributed computing fabric at Cloud Scale on AWS. That's right. Did I get that right? Yeah, and it touches all the different deployments you may have on-prem, virtual, Cloud Native, you name it. So how do the people turn into architects? This is, again, we had this earlier conversation with Tom, multi-tool players, a baseball analogy I used is like it signifies the best player. Your customers are becoming multiple tool players or operators. The new operator is now the top talent. They got to run Ansible, they got to automate, they got to provide services to the Cloud Native developers. So this new role is emerging. It's not a cloud architect, but it's going to be system architecture wide. What's this new person look like that's going to run all this? I think it's an interesting question. We were talking yesterday, actually, Tom and I were talking with the partners. We had Partner Day, the first ever at Ansible Fest yesterday, which was great, we got a lot of insight. They talked a lot about this platform focus, right? How do customers are looking to create that platform so that the developers can come in and build upon it without compromising what they want to do? So I do think there's a move in that direction to say, how do you create these platforms at a company that no compromises, but it provides that consistency? I would say one thing in partnerships like this, I think customer expectations on the partner ecosystem to have it be trusted is increasing. They expect us, as we've done, to have our engineers roll up their sleeves together to come to the table together. That's going to show up in our curated content. It's going to show up in our validated content. Those are the places, I think, where we come up from the bottom through our partnership and we help bridge that gap. And trust was brought up a number of times this morning during Makina. We're almost out of time here, but I think it's one of those words that a lot of companies use, but I think what you're showing is really the value in it from Ansible's perspective, from AWS's perspective, and ultimately the value in it for the customer. So I got to ask you one final question, and maybe as what we invent is around the corner, what's next for the partnership? Obviously, big news today. I'm already looking down the pipe. What are some of the things that you think are going to become an exit you can share? I mean, at this point, and I'll pass it to Moncie to close us out, but we are continuing to follow, to meet our customers where they want to be. We are looking across our portfolio for different ways that customers want to consume within AWS. We'll continue to look at the procurement models through the partner programs that Moncie and the team have had. And to me, the next step is really bringing in the rest of the ecosystem. How do we use this as a grounding step? Yeah, absolutely. So we are always listening to customer feedback and they want more Red Hat products in the marketplace. So that's where we'll be. In the marketplace. Congratulations, great deal. Yes, great work there, guys. And customers always want more. That's the thing, but that's what keeps us going. So we love it. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program today. It's been great to have you. And congratulations again. It's a pleasure. Thank you. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago at Ansible Fest 2022. This is only day one of our coverage. We'll be back after a short break for more.