 Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. This is day two of the Cube's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022, a different format this year for Red Hat Summit. You know, we're used to the eight to 9,000 people, big conferences, but this is definitely, and a lot of developers, this is definitely a smaller, more intimate, more abbreviated keynotes, which I love that new style, really catering to the virtual audience as well as the physical audience. A lot of good stuff going on last night in the Seaport, which is a lot of fun. Stephanie Cheris is here, Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. On the move again, Stephanie, love to see it. Thank you, it's great to be here with you, and now in a little different bit of a role. Yeah, I'm happy that we're actually in Boston and we can face-to-face. You don't have to get in a plane, but we'll be on a lot of planes in the next few months. But look, a new role for you in ecosystems. You are interviewing all the partners, which is very cool, so you get a big observation space, as my friend Jeff Jonas would like to say. And so, but I'd like to observe the partner ecosystem in this new era is different. You know, I mean, it's just press releases going by. It's a really deep engineering and really interesting flywheel approaches. How is the cloud and the hybrid cloud ecosystem and partner ecosystem different today? I think there's a couple of things. I think first of all, cloud, accelerating all the innovation, it pulls in, the whole cloud motion pulls in a cloud partner, in addition to many of the other partners that you need to deploy a solution. So this makes almost every deployment a multi-partner deployment. So that creates the need, not just for one-on-one partnerships between companies and vendors, but really for a multi-partner experience, right? How does an ISV work with a distributor, work with a cloud vendor? How do you pull all of that together? And I think at Red Hat, our view of being a platform company, we want to be able to span that and bring all of those folks together. So I see this transition going from a world of partnerships into a world of a networked ecosystem. And the real benefit is when you can pull together one ecosystem with another ecosystem, build that up and it really becomes an ecosystem of ecosystems. Well, and you're a, you know, I'm a fan, you're a multi-tool star, so it kind of makes you dangerous because you can talk tech, you've had technical roles, you've been a GM, so you understand the business. And that's really what it takes in the partner ecosystem. It can't be just technology and just engineering integration. There's got to be a business model associated with that. Talk about that, those two dimensions. And I think what we're seeing in the ecosystem is there are partners that you build with, there are partners you service with, there are partners you sell with, some do all three, some do two out of three. How do you work those relationships? At the end of the day, every partner in the ecosystem wants to bring their value to the customer. And the real goal is how do you merge those values together? And I think, you know, as you know, right, I come from the technology and the product space. I love moving into this space where you look for those value and that synergy of value to bring better technology, a better procurement experience is often really important and simplicity of deployment to customers, but, you know, partners span everything we do. We develop with them, we build with them, we deploy with them, we service with them. It all has to come together. So how do you make this simple for customers? I mean, you're describing an increasingly complex environment. How do you simplify this? So, a couple of things. One, spot onto your point, Paul. I think customer expectations now are more aggressive than they've ever been. That the ecosystem has done pre-work before they show up. The customer doesn't want to be the one who's pulling together this from one vendor, this from another vendor and stitching it together themselves. So there's a number of things I think we've stepped in to try and do. Digital engagement for certification and deployment, the creation of operators on OpenShift is one way that technology from partners can be done and enabled more easily and quickly with Red Hat platforms. I think in addition, you've seen- Can you go a little deeper on that? Sure. And find that a little bit more, what does that mean? Yeah, so we have a, first off, we have a digital experience where partners can come in, they can certify and test their applications to run it on Red Hat platforms themselves. So it's a bit of a come one, come all. We also have an engineering team and a developer team to work side by side with them to build those into solutions. We've done things, again, to supplement that with capabilities of what we call validated patterns. Things we've done in the market with customers, with partners, we pull together a validated pattern, we put it onto GitHub so anyone can get access to it. It becomes kind of a recipe for deployment. That's available for partners to come in and augment on top of that. Or customers can come in and pull it up, GitHub and build off of it. So I feel like there's different layers in the sort of build model that we work with partners. And you want to be able to on-ramp any partner wherever they want to influence their value. It could be at the base certification level. It could be even with, REL9 was a good one, right? REL9 was the first version of REL that we deployed based upon the CentOS Stream model. The CentOS Stream is an upstream version of REL, very tightly tied into the development model. But it allowed partners to engage with that code prior to deployment, everything from hardware partners to ISV partners. It becomes a much more open way for them to collaborate with us. So there's so much we can do. What's the pitch to partners? I mean, I know Hybrid Cloud is fundamental to your value proposition. Not every, I mean, most people want Hybrid Cloud, even though the Cloud guys might not admit it. But so what's the pitch? How do you approach partners? There's got to be a common theme there. Pitch me. I think one of the things when it comes to the Red Hat ecosystem is the ecosystem itself has to bring value. Yes, we at Red Hat want to bring value. We want to come in and make it easy and simple for you to access our technology. We want to make it easy and simple to engage side by side in front of a customer. But at the end of the day, the value of the Red Hat ecosystem is not only Red Hat, it's our partnerships with others. It's our partnerships with the hyperscalers. It's our partnerships with ISVs. It's our work in open source communities. So it's not about Red Hat being the sort of epicenter of the ecosystem. The value comes from the collective ecosystem as it stands. And I think we've made a number of changes here at the beginning of the year in order to create a end to end team within Red Hat that does everything from the build to to the sell with all the way from end to end. And I think that's bringing a new layer of simplicity for our engagement with the partners. And it's allowing us to stitch together and introduce partners to partners. But you are a dot connector in a sense. Absolutely. And so, and you can't do it all. I mean, nobody can. But especially Red Hat, your strategy is not to do it all by design. So where are those, where's the big white spaces where you feel as though your strengths need to be complimented by the partners? Oh, I think you caught it spot on. We don't think we can do it all. We're a platform company. We know the value of hybrid cloud is all about bringing a flexibility of an ecosystem together. I think the places where we're really doubling down on is simplicity. So the Ansible announcement that we did, right? With Ansible Automation Platform on Azure. With that announcement, it brings in certified collections of ecosystem partners on that deployment. We do the work with Azure in order to do that deployment of Ansible Automation Platform. And then it comes with a set of certified collections that have been done with other partners. And I think those are the pieces where we can really double down on bringing simplicity, right? So if I look at areas of focus, that's a great space. And I think it is all about connecting the dots, right? It's about connecting our work with Azure with our work with other ISV partners to pull that together and show up to a customer with something that's fast time to value. With so many partners to manage, how do you make sure you're not playing favorites? I guess, how do you treat all partners equally? Or do you even try? We absolutely try. I think there is, it is a, any partnership is a relationship, right? So it is what Red Hat brings to the table. It's also what the partner brings to the table. Our goal is to understand what the value is the partner wants to deliver to the customer. We focus on that and bringing that to the forefront of what we deploy. We absolutely, in a hybrid world, it's about choice and flexibility. Certainly there are partners and we made some announcements, of course, this week, right? Yesterday and today with some, we're continued to deepen our partnerships with those folks who are doubling down with us, where their strategy is very well aligned with us. But our goal is to bring a broad ecosystem that offers customers choice. That's what Hybrid Cloud's all about. I remember years ago, your colleague Bob Pitchiano, I went down and met him in his office and he's schooled me. He was awesome. We did a white board on alternative processors. You guys were doing combat duty in the power division at the time. But basically he helped me understand the trend that has absolutely come true, which is alternative processors. It's not just about the CPU anymore, it's about all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators and all these other connected parts. You guys, obviously, are in the middle of that. You've got relationships with ARM, NVIDIA, Intel, we saw on stage today. Explain the importance and the trends that you see of these alternative processors and accelerators and what that means for customers in terms of the applications that they're now going to be able to tap. Yeah, so you know I love this topic when it comes. So one of the spaces is EDGE, right? We talked about EDGE today. EDGE to me is the epitome of kind of a white space and an opportunity where ecosystem is essential. EDGE is pulling together unique hardware capabilities from an accelerator all the way out to new network capabilities and then to AI applications. I mean the number of ISVs building AI applications is just expanding. So it's really that top-to-bottom ecosystem story and our work with the telcos comes in, our work with the ARM partners, the NVIDIAs of the world, the accelerators of the world comes in and EDGE and then you pull it up to the applications as well. And then to touch in, we're seeing EDGE be deployed a lot in industries, in industry verticals, right? A lot of EDGE deployments are tailored for a retail market or for a financial services sector. Again, for us, we rely very much on the ecosystem to go into industry verticals. We're a platform company, so our goal is to find those key partners in those industry verticals who speak the speak, talk the language and we partner with them in order to support them in. So this whole EDGE space pulls all of that together, I think, even out to the go-to-market with industry alignment. It's interesting to the partners, so we're talking about silicon, we can talk about that all day long. And then it spans and we had Accenture on, we had Raj on yesterday. And it was interesting because you think Accenture is like deep vertical industry expertise, which it is, but Raj's role is really cross industry and then to tap into that industry expertise. You guys had an announcement yesterday with those guys. Obviously, the GSIs are key players. We saw a bunch of them last night out and about. So talk about the importance of those relationships. I think it's great. We are in the announcement with Accenture is a great one, right? We're really doubling down because customers are looking to them, they're looking to the Accenture's of the world to help them move into this hybrid world. It's not simple. It's not simple to deploy and get that value of the flexibility. So Accenture has built a number of tools in order to help customers on that journey, which he talked about yesterday. It really is a continuum of how customers adopt for their cloud space. And so, ARS partnering with them offers a platform underneath, give them technology capabilities and Accenture is able to help customers and guide them along that journey and add a new layer of simplicity. So I think the GSIs are critical in this space. You talked about the number of companies developing AI, new AI tools right now and it seems like there's just, the pace of innovation is amazing. The number of startups is unpricevended. How do you decide who makes it into your partner system? What bars do they have to jump over to become a Red Hat partner? I think our whole partner structure is layered out quite honestly a bit in tiering depending upon how much the partner how much the partner is moving forward with Red Hat, how strategically we are aligned are, et cetera. But there is definitely a tier that is a come one, come all, get your technology to work with Red Hat. We do that digitally now in the world of digital it's much easier to do that, to give accessibility. But there is definitely a tier that is a come one, come all and participate. And then above that it comes into tierings. How deeply do we go to do joint building, to do co-creation and how do we sort of partner even on things like we have Arrow and Rosa, as you know which is OpenShift built with AWS, with Azure. Those provide very deep technical engagements to bring that level of simplicity. But I would say it spans all the layers. We do have a dedicated engineering team to work with the ecosystem partners. We have a dedicated digital team to reach out and proactively invite folks to participate and encourage them through the thing and through the whole path. And we've done some things on enablement. We just made early March, we made enablement free for all our partners in order to learn more and get more skilled in Red Hat. Skills and skill creation is just critical for partners and we want to start there, right? We started this conversation with how cloud ecosystems are different. And I think AWS has the mother of all ecosystems. So does Microsoft too, but they've had it for a while. And I felt like last decade partners were kind of afraid, all right, we're going to partner with a cloud vendor but they're going to eat our lunch. I noticed last year at re-invent, that whole dynamic is changing. And I think the industry is realizing this is not a zero sum game, that there's just so much opportunity, especially when you start thinking about the edge. So you guys use the term hybrid, right? And we put, John and I wrote a piece prior to re-invent last year. We said there's something new brewing. We've got on-prem connecting to the clouds. It's going across clouds. People call that multi-cloud. But multi-cloud has been like multi-vendor. It really hasn't been a sort of strategy or a technical layer. And now you're talking the edge and we see the hyperscaler spending $100 billion a year on infrastructure. And now we see companies like yours and your ecosystem building on top of that. They're not afraid of it anymore. They're actually looking at it as a gift. And so we coined this term called super cloud, which is a subtraction layer. And it rises above, hides all the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs and people kind of wince at the term. A shesh called it metacloud, which I like. It's kind of fun. But do you feel like that's happening in the ecosystem? Is that a real trend or is that just my imagination? I think it's definitely a real trend. And it's coming from customers, right? That's what customers want. So customers want the ability to choose. Are they going to self-manage their applications within a public cloud? There's much more than just technology in the public cloud too, right? There's a procurement experience that they provide a simplicity of a relationship. They may choose one of the hyperscalers. They pick a procurement experience. They deepen that relationship. They leverage the services. And I think now what you're seeing is customers are demanding it. They want to be a part of that. They want to run on multiple clouds. And now we're looking at cloud services. You've seen our strategy double down on cloud services. I think that kind of comes back together to a customer wants simplicity. They expect the ecosystem to work together behind the scenes. That's what capabilities like Arrow or OpenShift on Azure and OpenShift on AWS. That's what we can provide. We have an SRV team. We jointly support it with those partners behind the scenes. But it's no, as you said, it's no longer that fear, right? We've rolled up our sleeves together specifically because we wanted to show up to the customer as one. Yeah, and by the way, it's not just traditional technology vendors. It's insurance companies, it's banks, it's manufacturers who are building out these so-called super clouds. And to have a super cloud, you got to have a super pass and OpenShift is the superest of all passes. So Stephanie, cheers. Thanks so much for coming back. It was my pleasure. It was great to see you again. Thank you for the time. All right, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is day two of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE.