 We wanted to compete against them last. Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are here today with Joe Fitzgerald. He is the Vice President of Management at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us, Joe. Thanks for having me. So I want to talk to you about automating the enterprise. This is really right in your wheelhouse. You came out with a few new product announcements this morning. Tell us more about those. So as all these technologies change, it really puts a lot of pressure on enterprises to try and figure out how to manage all this stuff. If you think about the complexity and the rate of change, it's a lot harder to follow that around with management and security and automation. So we have this vision around enterprise automation, which I'm really excited to talk about. So tell us more. How does it help reduce the workload, or at least automate the workload, maybe? Well, so automation, if you think of what's going on in other sectors, like self-driving cars or home automation, what's happening is you have these silos of automation that are now being sort of composed into systems of automation. One of the challenges that enterprises have faced for years is they've got lots of tools, sometimes dozens of tools, that each tool is good at automating one little thing. So it's kind of like your cruise control on your car or your nav system or something like that, but they don't talk to each other. So what we announced today is we have this vision and it's going to take time for people to get there, but they need to move towards enterprise automation. And there's some fundamentally new technology over the past couple of years that we're leveraging called Ansible, which will allow us to automate across many domains and tie things together. So that's the vision. Right. How will it work? Well, so we actually announced some products today that are huge delivery on part of that vision, which is we announced CloudForms 4.5, which has Ansible inside. Ansible is this incredibly popular open source technology that's sort of taken the world by storm. It's a couple of years old, but it's gotten this incredible open source community adoption, which Red Hat is certainly familiar with. And so we acquired this company about a year and a half ago and under Red Hat's nurturing, because we're really good at open source, this thing has really sort of exploded in terms of the interest in the community. At the same time, we're seeing enterprises now adopted in incredible rates. So they're telling us, look, we want this technology and it can help us automate everything from our network to our compute and our storage. We can use it in clouds. We can use it on our physical stuff. We can automate some of our old things which are dragging us down, as well as some of these really cool differentiating new applications they're trying to get out. Joe, the headline of the press release says that this is analytics driven automation. So, you know, talk about the operational impact here. Do I need to get a data scientist on my team now to manage all my things? You know, kind of the, you know, where does this fit with what they're doing today and how do they take advantage of it? It's a great question. So the second product announcement that we made is around an offering we have called Red Hat Insights and it's a predictive analytics capability. So if you think about Red Hat's experience, we have tens of thousands of customers worldwide. We've dealt with millions of cases. We've got really smart engineers working in all these different technologies. So in collecting data from our customers, we use big data, machine learning, to derive insights into what's going on. Now we can analyze systems for our customers and tell them what's wrong. As the name implies, it gives them insights into what's going on. They don't have to hire data scientists. We have really smart people. But by basically getting insights into those systems, we could tell you, hey, this system's not secure or it has some performance problems, but you would have to then go make changes to fix it. With this announcement today, we've tied together ansible technology around automation so that we can say, here's what you need to change. Would you like us to change it? We dynamically generate the changes necessary. Joe, this resonates for me so much. I lived, you know, back a dozen years ago. I worked in an interoperability lab for a large storage company that's a partner of yours. And we were like, well, we have a little bit of data about what the customer's doing. We know exactly how stuff should be configured, but matching that patches and early on in kind of the API cycle, trying to figure that out, make sure that we could remediate or, hey, is there a security issue or some patch that they should know about getting that flow of information? Just didn't exist 10, 12 years ago. So why now, how can we make it better, make sure, you know, what's the impact going to be for the customers? Well, so a couple of things. First of all, there's new technology, right? So this ansible technology I described is fundamentally different, right? We believe that that can help us across a lot of different domains to automate. I think the other thing is that, you know, automation tools have been very, very difficult for people to use. And you hear about continuous development, continuous integration. You probably haven't heard much about continuous management or continuous automation or continuous security. Those things need to be automated. If you're going to be changing at the rate businesses would like to change, you're going to need some really new tools to be able to automate those things at the speed of business. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the joke I've had is, you know, hey, what version of AWS are you running on? Or what version of Azure you're running on? They take care of that. The enterprise, there's some stuff that they're going to do internal. There's some stuff that they're going to, you know, do in the public cloud, but they need to be able to, you know, get to that newer version. My friends that are in security are always like the biggest challenge is right. You know, I haven't gotten that latest update or there's some vulnerability that I need to do. So I need to have more of that kind of CICD mentality in some of the other spaces. Yeah, I mean, if you think the rate of change right now between multi-clouds, right? Containers, new processes like DevOps. I mean, there's just incredible amount of technology changing, right? And a lot of the tools enterprises have, some of them are 10, 15 years old. They didn't even have these things around when those tools were created. So they can't really deal with the physics, right? Of these new environments and how to do it. Now you can get a tool from each vendor or each cloud or each platform to manage it, but now you're the person who's got this arsenal of tools with teams that have to learn 27 tools. And then your security example is a great one. How do I know everything's secure? Do I go to each of those 27 teams and go, how's the network? How's my storage? How's my compute? How's the app? Oh, and by the way, it changed at noon today. Are we good? That's really complicated. So the benefit of automation is that it does free up people's time to do other things in their jobs. So do you see that we will see more innovation coming out of these teams when they aren't having to check the network, check the network and make sure that the patch is working? I mean, how do you see this changing the way people do their jobs? Well, so we see two sort of ends of the spectrum that people automate. They automate some of the traditional stuff they have which puts drag on them from a resource and a cost point of view. So they can modernize and optimize their old stuff, automate that. Now they can focus on their new services and really focus on the automation of what's going to change their business and help them compete in this world. So by optimizing the old, they can take some of those resources and put it into the new business services. Joe, so you said Ansible was acquired about 18 months ago and the announcement you went through looked like it's really weaving into the fabric of a lot of other products. Can you maybe walk us through a little bit about that where Ansible's gone and maybe a little bit of vision towards where else it will end up in the portfolio? Sure, so we've leveraged it in our management portfolio with the announcements you see today. But we're also leveraging it in the rest of Red Hat's portfolio. If you look at Red Hat OpenStack or OpenShift, our Red Hat virtualization, and in the future our Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we'll all have bits and pieces of Ansible technology in because those things help customers consume that to install it, configure it, manage it, and automate it at a higher level. So we're trying to make the best automated products we can deliver. And then on the management side, whether you're using Red Hat products or you're managing a hybrid environment with other products, which is a lot of the case, then you're going to have a set of tools that's going to be able to automate that even further. So we're being good citizens by providing products that are inherently manageable and automatable when you get them from us. And then we're providing tools that allow you to manage these very complex, multicloud environments. One of the big things we are talking about is the workplace culture. Jim Whitehurst has done such an incredible job of really creating this open culture at Red Hat. How does it play out on a micro scale in terms of how do IT leaders and managers give their employees, their teams, time to innovate and as well as the opportunity to take risks and to try things? Well it's interesting because you know, open source has sort of changed over the years from sort of a commodity play where I can get something cheaper because it's the open source version of something, let's say Linux. Now we've gone to the other end of the spectrum where a lot of the new innovations, in this case management, is happening in an open source community. So businesses can go and try that technology without contacting a vendor. They can sample it, they can follow it, they can see the rate of adoption. Everything's done in the open so they can see how transparent things are going. And basically they can leverage that technology. A lot of them have no choice. If they don't leverage open source innovations their competitors will. Okay and they're going to be basically at a disadvantage from a technology stack or management tool, whether it's containers and open shift or running in different platforms or storage, they really need to leverage the open source community. So we're seeing mandates. Some companies that years ago were fearful of open source are now making investments and coming up with company policies for how to contribute to open source and we're seeing a lot more open source consumption. And is that driven out of fear? As you said, if we don't do it our competitors will or has there been a real shift in mindset? No, I think it's more carrot than stick. I think that they see the innovation whether it's big data or artificial intelligence in my area in automation and management that that's where a lot of the innovation is going. So if they want the best technology to be able to bring to bear on their business and their IT needs they're going to look in open source because that's where it's happening. So let's look into the future a little bit and think about where we will be five, 10 years from now. What are your predictions? Well, I think there's just a huge trend towards automation. You're going to see it, we're seeing it in consumer life you're going to see it in business life. So automation across all different areas. And I think as things become more instrumentable and automatable think about internet of things where you're going to have hundreds of devices in your house, right? You would like them to talk to each other. You'd like your smoke detector to talk to your camera to talk to your phone to talk to your light switch, et cetera. Those are examples of automation that people are going to try to tie these things together. Try to make systems of automation. You're seeing it around personal digital assistants and the Alexas and the series and the different systems like that. Self-driving cars, we've gone from not having any of them to there's a bunch of vendors that are all buying for that. I think you're going to see those kind of system-wide automation in a lot of different industries. Joe, Spread Hat really isn't a services business. It's very much a subscription model. But how much do you have to help companies to kind of fix their processes before they automate, before they automate because we all know it's like, I can't just say, oh, let's take my existing process and automate it because many times, you don't want to automate what's not working well. You want to kind of fix the process a little bit first and then automate it. How does Red Hat get involved or what partners use for that? It's a great question. So a number of things. First of all, we have a lot of partners, right? Red Hat is a trusted advisor, right? So we can tell customers what's working, especially on the new technologies because we're building a lot of them when it comes to containers or object storage or different things. We're building, right? Ansible, we have a lot of developers working and pushing that. So we're a trusted advisor. We also work with a lot of partners, system integrators, service providers, VARs, people who are steeped in the technology. And in the case of the open source technologies, they can get involved. They're contributing code. They're providing a training. In the case of management, we have SI's now providing automation practices. So if you said, gee, I need help automating my old stuff, you could get one of the big SI's to come in who's got, you know, in some cases, you know, they've got a thousand people trained up in Ansible to come in and help you automate your processes, whether they're the old ones or the shiny new ones you're trying to deploy. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. First to minimum, we will return with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit after this.