 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, everyone, it's theCUBE's live coverage of AnsibleFest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're here at Stephanie Charis. He's the Vice President and General Manager of the RELL Business Unit, Red Hat. Great to see you. We've been interviewing you all year through your career at IBM. Now, Ansible, back in the fold. It's the last time we chatted at Red Hat Summit, RELL 8. How's that going? What's the update? Yeah, so we launched RELL 8 at Summit. It was a huge opportunity for us to sort of show it off to the world. Couple of key things we really wanted to do there was make sure that we showed off the Red Hat portfolio. It wasn't just a product launch, it was really a portfolio launch. Feedback so far on RELL 8 has been great. We have a lot of adopters on there early. It's still pretty early days when you think about it. It's been about a little over four, five months. So still early days, the feedback has been good. It's actually interesting when you run a subscription-based software model because customers can choose to go to eight when they need those features and when they assess those features and they can pick and choose how they go, but we have a lot of folks who have areas of RELL 8 that they're testing the feature function of. I saw a tweet you had on your Twitter feed, 28 years old, still growing up, still cool. I mean, 28 years old, it's not in the real world. It's an adult now. No, Linux is running the enterprises now and now it's about how do you bring new innovation in? When we launched RELL 8, we focused really on two sectors. One was, how do we help you run your business more efficiently and then how do we help you grow your business with innovation? One of the key things we did, which is probably the one that stuck with me the most, was we actually partnered with the Red Hat Management Organization and we pulled in the capability of what's called insights into their product itself. So all current subscriptions, six, seven, eight, all include insights, which is a rules-based engine built upon the data that we have from, you know, over 15 years of helping customers run large-scale Linux deployments and we leveraged that data in order to bring that directly to customers and that's been huge for us and it's not only, it's the first step into getting into Ansible, right? I want to get your thoughts on, we're here at Ansible Fest, day one of our two-day coverage. The Red Hat announced the Ansible Automation Platform. Obviously that's the news. Why is this show so important in your mind? I mean, you see the internal, you've seen the history of the industries, a lot of technology changes happening in the modern enterprises now as things become modernized, both public sector and commercial. What's the most important thing happening? Why is this Ansible Fest so important this year? To me it comes down to, I'd say, kind of two key things. Management and automation are becoming one of the key decision makers that we see in our customers and that's really driven by, they need to be efficient with what they have running today and they need to be able to scale and grow into innovation platforms. So management and automation is a core critical decision point. I think the other aspect is, you know, Linux started out 28 years ago proving to the world how open source development drives innovation and that's what you see here at Ansible Fest. This is the community coming together to drive innovation. Super modular, able to provide impact right from everything from how you run your legacy systems to how you bring security to it into how do you bring new applications and deploy them in a safe and consistent way. It spans the whole gambit. So Stephanie, you know, there's so much change going on in the industry. You talked about, you know, what's happening in Relate. I actually saw a couple of Hello World t-shirts which were given out at Summit in Boston this year. Maybe help tie together how Ansible fits into this. How does it help customers, you know, take advantage of the latest technology and move their companies along to be able to take advantage of some of the new features? Yeah, and so I really believe, of course, that an open hybrid cloud, which is our vision of where people want to go, you need Linux. So Linux sits at the foundation, but to really deploy it in a reasonable way, in a safe way, in an efficient way, you need management and automation. So we've started on this journey. When we launched, we announced at Summit that we brought in insights in. That was our first step. Included in, we've seen incredible uptick. So when we launched, we've seen 87% increase since May in the number of systems that are linked in. We're seeing 33% more increase in coverage of rules-based and 152% increase in customers who are using it. What that does is it creates a community of people using and getting value from it, but also giving value back, because the more data we have, the better the rules get. So one interesting thing, at the end of May, the engineering team, they worked with all the customers that currently have insights linked in, and they did a scan for Spectre Meltdown, which, of course, everyone knows about in the industry. With the customers who had systems hooked up, they found 176,000 customer systems that were vulnerable to Spectre Meltdown. What we did was we've had an Ansible playbook that could remediate that problem. We proactively alerted those customers. So now you start to see problems get identified with something like insights. Now you bring in Ansible and Ansible Tower. You can effectively decide, do I want to remediate? I can remediate automatically. I can schedule that remediation for what's best for my company. So we've tied these three things together, kind of in the stepwise function. In fact, if you have a rel subscription, you've hooked up to insights, if insights finds an issue, there's a fix it button with Ansible, creates a playbook. Now I can use that playbook in Ansible Tower. So really ties through nicely through the whole portfolio to be able to do everything in a really secure way. It also creates collaboration to these playbooks that can be portable move across the organization, do it once, that's the automation piece. Is that the key? Yeah, absolutely. So now we're seeing automation, how do you look at it across multiple teams within an organization? So you could have a Tower admin be able to set rules and boundaries for teams. I can have a rel, right, IT operations person be able to create playbooks for the security protocols. How do I set up a system? Being able to do things repeatedly and consistently brings a whole lot of value in security and efficiency. Yeah, one of the powers of Ansible is that it can live in a heterogeneous environment. You got your Windows environment, I've talked to VMware customers that are using it, and of course in cloud. Help us understand kind of the rel, why rel plus Ansible is an optimal solution for customers in those heterogeneous environment. And what would love, I heard a little bit in the keynote about kind of the roadmap where it's going. Maybe you can talk about where those will fit together. Yeah, perfect. And I think your comment about a heterogeneous world is key. That is the way we live. And folks will have to live in a heterogeneous as far as the eye can see. And I think that's part of the value, right, to bring choice. When you look at what we do with rel, because of the close collaboration we have between my team and the team in the management BU around Insights, our engineering team is actively building rules so we can bring added value from the sense of we have our Red Hat engineers who build rel, creating rules to mitigate things, to help things with migration. So you asked about rel 8 and adoption. We put in in place upgrades of course in the product, but also there's a whole set of rules curated, supported by Red Hat that help you upgrade to rel 8 from a prior version. So it's the tight engineering collaboration that we can bring, but to your point it's, we want to make sure that Ansible and Ansible Tower and the rules that are set up bring added value to rel and make that simple, but it does have to be in a heterogeneous world. I'm going to live with neighbors in any data center of course. What one of the pieces of the announcement talked about collections. Is there anything specific from your team that which should be pointed out about from a collections and the platform announcement? So I think as collection starts to grow, and it brings out sort of the simplicity of being pulled playbooks and roles and pull that all into one spot. We'll be looking at key scenarios that we pull together that mean the most to rel customers. Migration of course is one. We have other spaces of course where we work with key ecosystem partners. Of course SAP HANA running on rel has been a big focus for us in partnership with SAP. We have a playbook for installing SAP HANA on rel. So this collaboration will continue to grow. I think collections offers a huge opportunity for a simpler experience to be able to kind of do a automated solution if you will kind of on your floor. Automation for all, that's the theme here. I want to get your thoughts on the comment you made about analytics capabilities inside rel. This seems to be a key area for insights tying the two things together. So kind of cohesive, but decoupled. I see how that works. What kind of analytical capabilities are you guys serving up today? And what's coming around the corner because the environments are changing. Hybrid and multi-cloud are part of what everyone's talking about. Take care of the on-premises first. Take care of the public cloud. Now hybrids, now an operating model has to look the same. This is a key thing. What kind of new capabilities of analytics do you see coming? Yeah, so let me step you through that a little bit because your point is exactly right. Our goal is to provide a single experience that can be on-prem or off-prem and provides value across both as you choose to deploy. So Insights, which is the analytics engine that we use built upon our data, you can have that on-prem with rel, you can have it off-prem with rel in the public cloud so where we have data coming in from customers who are running rel on the public cloud. So that provides a single view. So if you see a security vulnerability, you can scan your entire environment, which is great. I mentioned earlier, the more people we have participating, the more value comes. So new rules are being created. So as a subscription model, you get more value as you go and you can see the automation analytics that was announced today as part of the platform. So that brings analytics capabilities to, first, to be able to see who's running what, how much value they're getting out of analytics, that the presentation by JPMorgan Chase was really compelling to see the value that automation is delivering to them. For a company to be able to look at that in a dashboard with analytics automation, that's huge value. They can decide, do we need to leverage it here more? Do we need to bring it value here? Now you combine those two together, right? It's, and being informed is the best. I want to get your reaction to, we made a comment on our opening, Stu and I on our opening segment around the JPMorgan comment, hours to minutes, sometimes days to minutes, depending upon what the configuration is. Automation is a wonderful thing. We're a pro automation, as you know. We think it's going to be a huge category, but we took a survey inside our community and we asked our practitioners and our community members about automation and they came back with the following, and I want to get your reaction. Four major benefits of automation. Focused efforts allows for better results, efficiency. Security is a key driver in all this. You mentioned that. Automation drives job satisfaction. And then finally, the infrastructure DevOps folks are getting re-skilled up the stack as the software abstraction. Those are the four main points of why automation's impacting enterprise. Do you agree with that? Can you give any comments on some of those points? No, I do, I agree. I think skills is one thing that we've seen over and over again. Skills is key. We see it in Linux. We have to help bridge Windows skills into Linux skills. I think automation that helps with skills development helps not only individuals, but helps the company. I think the second piece that you mentioned about job satisfaction, at the end of the day, all of us want to have impact. And when you can leverage automation for one individual to have impact, that is much broader than they could do before with manual tasks, that's just... You know, Stu and I were talking also about one of the key words that kept on coming out in the keynote was scale. Scale's driving a lot of change in the industry at many levels. Certainly software automation drives more value when you have scale, because when you're scaling more stuff, you can't manually configure that stuff at scale. So software certainly is going to be a big part of that. But the role of cloud providers, the big cloud providers, the IBM, Amazon, all the big enterprises like Microsoft, they're driving massive scale. So there's a huge change in the open source community around how to deal with scale. This is a big topic of conversation. What's your thoughts on this? Is there any general opinions on how the scale is changing the open source equation? Is it more towards platforms, less tools, vice versa? Is there any trends you see? I think it's interesting, because I think when I think of scale, I think both volume or quantity as the hyperscalers do, I think also it's about complexity. I think the public clouds have great volume that they have to deal with in numbers of systems, but they have the ability to customize, leveraging development teams and leveraging open source software. They can customize. They can customize all the way down to the servers and the processor chips, as we know. For most folks, they scale, but when they scale across on-prem and off-prem, it's adding complexity for them. And I think automation has value both in solving volume issues around scale, but also in complexity issues around scale. So even, you know, mid-sized businesses, if they want to leverage on-prem and off-prem, to them, that's complexity scale. And I think automation has a huge amount of value to bring there. And that abstracts away the complexity. Automation provides the jobs to abstract, but also the benefits of efficiency. Absolutely. To me, the greatest value of efficiency is now there's more time to bring in innovation, right? It's a... Stephanie, last thing, I wonder in what feedback are you hearing from customers? You know, one of the things that struck me we were talking about the J.P. Morgan is they made great progress, but he said they had about a year of working with the security, the cyber, the control groups to help get them through that knot hole of allowing them to really deploy automation. So, you know, usually something like Ansible, you think, oh, I can get a team and let me get it going, but, oh wait, no, hold on, corporate needs to make its way through. What is that something you hear generally? Is that a large enterprise thing? You know, what are you hearing from customers that you're talking to? I think we see it more and more and it came up in the discussions today. The technical aspect is one aspect. The sort of cultural or the ability to pull it in is a whole separate aspect. And you think that technology, right? All of us who are engineers, we think, well, that's the tough bit. But actually the culture bit is just as hard. One thing that I see over and over again is the way companies are structured has a big impact. The more siloed the teams are, do they have a way to communicate? Because fixing that so that when you bring in automation, it has that ability to sort of drive more ubiquitous value across. But if you're not structured to leverage that, it's really hard. If your IT ops guys don't talk to the application folks, bringing that value is very hard. So I think it is kind of going along in parallel, right? The technical capabilities is one aspect. How you get your organization structured to reap the benefits is another aspect. And it's a journey. That's really what I see from folks. It is a journey. And I think it's inspiring to see the stories here when they come back and talk about it. But to me, the most, the greatest thing about it is just start, right? Just start wherever you are. And our goal is to try and help on ramps for folks wherever their journey is. It's a great opportunity for people's careers and certainly the modernization of the enterprise and public sector and governments from how they procure technology to how they deploy it and consume it is radically changing. Very quickly, by the way, too, scale and these things are happening. I got to get your take on it. I want to get your expert opinion on this because you've again been in the industry. You have so many different experiences. The cloud 1.0 was the era of compute, storage, startups can start in, Airbnb start. All these companies are examples of cloud scale. But now as we start to get into the impact to businesses in the enterprise with hybrid, multi-cloud, there's a cloud 2.0 equation. Again, we mentioned observability was just network management at white space. Small category, which companies are going public. It's an important now kind of subsystem of cloud 2.0. Automation seems to feel the same way we believe. What's your definition of cloud 2.0? If cloud 1.0 is simply stand up some storage and compete, use the public cloud. And cloud 2.0 is enterprise. What does that mean to you? How would you describe cloud 2.0? So my view is cloud 1.0 was all about capability. Cloud 2.0 is all about experience. And that is bringing a whole new way that we look at every product in the stack. It has to be a seamless, simple experience. And that's where automation and management comes in in spades because all of that stuff you needed in capability, having it be secure, having it be reliable, resilient, all of that still has to be there, but now you need the experience. So to me, it's all about the experience and how you pull that together. And that's why we're hoping, you know, I'm thrilled here to be at Ansible Fest because the more I can work with the teams that are doing Ansible and Insights and the management aspect and the automation, it'll make the rel experience better. The beautiful thing is software drives it all. Absolutely, absolutely. Stephanie, thanks for sharing your insights on theCUBE. My pleasure. We appreciate you coming back on. And great to see you. Great to be here. Good to see you both. We have coverage here in Atlanta. I'm John Furze, Stu Miniman, CUBE coverage here at Ansible Fest. More coverage after this short break. We'll be right back.