 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21, virtual, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE this year, virtual again, soon to be in real life, post COVID as the fall comes into play. We're going to start to see life come back and the digital transformation continue to accelerate. And we've got a great guest, Stephanie Chair, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Red Hat, CUBE alumni, great to see you. Stephanie, thanks for coming on. No, it's my pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here with you and look forward to doing it in person soon. I can't wait. A lot of people on their vaccines. Some say that by the fall vaccines, where pretty much everyone with 12 and over will be vaccinated, but we're going to start to see the onboarding of real life again, but never going to be the same. Digital business at the speed of online offline, almost redefine and reimagine, not the old offline online paradigms. You're starting to see that come together. That's the focus. That's the top story in the technology industry. That really brings together the topic that I'd like to talk to you about, which is edge computing and rail and Linux. This is the topic where all the action is. Obviously hybrid operating models have been pretty much agreed upon by the industry. That is the way it is. Multi-cloud is on the horizon, but edge, part of the distributed system, this is where the action is. A natural extension to the open hybrid cloud, which you guys have been pioneering. Take me through your thoughts on this edge computing dynamic with rail. Yeah, so as you said, we have been on this open hybrid cloud strategy for eight years or so, very focused on providing customers choice, both in where they run, what they run, how they run their applications. And the beauty of this strategy is the strategy endures because it's able to adapt to new technologies coming in. And as you said, edge is where things are happening now. It's enabling customers to do so many new and different things. You take kind of all of the dynamics that are happening in technology with data being produced everywhere, new even architectures and compute capabilities that can bring compute right out there to the data. You get 5G networks coming in and incredible advances in telco and networking. You pull that out. Now you've created a dynamic where the technology can really make edge a viable place to now extend how open hybrid cloud can reach and deliver value. And our goal is to bring our platform and our ecosystem to do everything from the core of your data center out to public clouds, multiple public clouds. And now bring that all the way out to the edge. You know, we talk about edge, you know, you talk about decentralization, distributed computing, these are the paradigms that are getting reimagined, if you will, and expanded. You guys talk about, and you talk about specifically this idea of digital first economy requires a new kind of infrastructure. Talk about this because this is, you know, some say virtual first, media first, data first, video first, I mean, developer first, everything's like a first thing, but this is, focus is on the new normal. Take us through this new economy. It's really about how you focus on being able to deliver digitally with decisions near the data and to be able to adapt to that. It's thinking about how you take footprints and now your footprint out at the edge becomes a part of that. Then one of the things that's really exciting about edge is it does have some specific use case requirements. And we're seeing some things come back. Things like, I mean, we've talked in the past about heterogeneous computing and heterogeneous architectures and the possibilities that exist there. Now at the edge, we're seeing different architectures show up which is great to see. Being able to bring a platform that can allow the use of those different architectures out at the edge to deliver value is a great thing. In addition, we're seeing bare metal come back out at the edge. You can really imagine spaces where out at the edge you have new architectures with bare metal deployments and you're operating containers that are touching directly onto that bare metal. It brings a whole new paradigm to how to deliver value but now we can bring the consistency of what Linux and RHEL and OpenShift with containers can bridge across that whole space. So heterogeneous computing, distributed computing, multi-vendor. If you kind of weave those keywords together you have to have a supporting operating model that allows for different services, cloud services, network services, application services work together. This kind of puts an emphasis on a control plane, a software platform that could bring this together. This is the core, if I understand, the Red Hat strategy properly. You guys are going right at this point. Is that true? Yeah, that's absolutely right. It is when everything else, you can get value from everything else changing what stays the same to help keep you efficient and consistent across it. And that's where we focus on the platforms. And as Open Hybrid Cloud changes with different optionalities, our focus is to bring that sort of single common control plane that provides consistency so you can develop once and reuse but make it adaptable to how you want to leverage that application as a container as a BM on bare metal out at the edge on multiple public clouds. It's really about expanding that landscape that Open Hybrid Cloud can touch. And you'll see in other discussions, one of the places we're going into new is in the edge, managed services also become part of that paradigm. So it really is our focus to be that common control plane provide accessibility while still delivering consistency. And let's face it, consistency down at the operating system level, that's what starts to deliver you things like security. And boy, it's a critical topic today, to make sure that as you expand and distribute and you got compute running out there with data, security is top of mind. I have to ask you, we've been having many conversations in the open source community, Linux Foundation, CNCF, KubeCon, CloudNativeCon and other communities. And the common thread is not want to get your reaction to the statement. The statement is edge computing's foundation must be open across the board. Talk about what's your reaction to that and how does that relate to Red Hat and what you guys are doing at the edge and with rail? I mean, we really believe in open source brings compatibility and standardization that allows innovation to grow. In any new technology, fragmentation causes the death of the new technology. So our focus is it will have to be, I mean, we firmly believe it absolutely has to be built on an open platform that has standards so that the ecosystem and the ecosystem around edge is complex. We have multiple hardware capabilities, multiple vendors. There, any edge deployment will be multi-vendor. So how do you pull all of that together in an ecosystem? It is about having that foundation be open and be able to be accessible and built upon by everyone. You know, you were talking earlier about the edge in 5G and we just talking about open, this is the future of computing, both consumer and enterprise, whether it's a factory or a consumer wearing a wearable device or sensors on cameras, on lights and cities and all these things are happening. I want to get your reaction to that because there's a difference between industrial IoT devices and consumer IoT devices. Both have different ramifications. You know, 5G certainly is not so much a consumer as it is also a business technology as you get the kind of throughput you're seeing. So both consumer and industrial enterprise capabilities are emerging. What's your position on that? I mean, I think edge is one of those things that it's been hard for people to wrap their head around a bit because what we deal with edge in our own personalized, whether that be in our connected home or our mobile phone, that's one view of what edge does and one set of value that it does. But from a separate lens, edge is everything from how telco is deployed to how data is aggregated in from sensors and how decisions are made. I mean, we're seeing in spaces whether it be in manufacturing and adding AI onto manufacturing floors. How do you have, you know, in vehicles? I mean, vehicles are becoming sort of mobile software centers now. So there is a whole shift in edge that is different from industry 4.0 and from kind of operational transformation edge that it's driving all the way into kind of the things that we see every day which is more the mobile space and how our homes are connected. And I think now we're starting to see a real maturity in how the world views edge to be able to compartmentalize what enterprise edge is able to do, how edge can change operational technologies as well as how edge can change kind of our daily lives. Great, great vision, great insights. Definitely awesome thought leadership there. I totally agree. I think it's exciting you see confluence of so many awesome technologies in a bright future with the technology platforms and with society open now is de facto everything not just in tech and truth whether it's journalism or reporting society and security again, trust, open trust technology I got all coming together the confluence of all those are is going on. So I think you got a great read on that. So thanks for sharing. Red Hat Summit, what's new? Tell us what's new here and what's being talked about that no one's heard before and what's the existing stuff that's getting better? Yeah, I would love to. So we are really doubling down on edge within our portfolio. We have, you probably saw in November we had some announcements both in OpenShift as well as in RHEL in order to add features and capabilities that deliver specifically for edge use cases. Things like the ability to do updates and roll back in a RHEL deployment. We are continuing to drive things into our products that cater to the needs of edge deployment. As part of that, we are engaged with a whole lot of customers today deploying their edge and that's across industries things from telco to energy to transportation. And so as we look at all of those cases that we've been kind of engaged with and delivering value to customers we are bringing forward the Red Hat Edge brand. It's going to be our collection point to shine a spotlight for how the features and functions in our portfolio can come together and be used to deliver in edge deployments. There'll be our space where we can showcase use cases where we're seeing success with customers but really to pull together because it is a portfolio story and it's an ecosystem story. How do we pull to that together in one spot? And in order to support that here at Summit we are announcing some really key additions into RHEL 8.4 that really focus on the specific needs of what edge is driving. You'll see things like the ability in RHEL to create streamlined OS image generation and we can simply manage that into container images. That container magic, right? To be able to repeatedly deploy an image, repeatedly deploy an application out to the edge that has become a key need in these edge deployments. So we've simplified that so operations teams can really meet the scale of their fleets and deploy it in a super consistent way. We've added capabilities, image builder we had brought out already but we've added capabilities to create customized installation media. It simplifies for bare metal deployments and as I mentioned out of the edge where it's really small bare metal deployments where you can bring that container right on to their bare metal can imagine a lot of situations where that brings a lot of value. We introduced in RHEL 8.0 Podman as our container engine and we've added new automatic updates in that. So again, getting back to security fixes simple to ensure that you have the latest security fixes application updates and we're continuing to add changes and updates into universal base image. Universal base image is a collection of user space packages that are available to the community fully redistributable. The goal of those user space packages is to enable developers to be able to create container images with those packages included and then they can redistribute them when they're run on OpenShift or they're run on RHEL so we can really work through that user space and that host matching and we can stand behind that matching then we can support it but it allows for a lot of freedom and flexibility with universal base image to really expand where we can go and help folks kind of create, deploy and develop their applications. We're also moving into, I think, one of the things you see an edge is a real industry slant. We're starting to see edge deployments take on real industry flavors and so we are engaging in some spots things like whether it be from automotive to industrial and operational technology how do we engage in those industry verticals? How do we engage with the right partners? One of the things that's key that we're looking at because it is core to what we do is things like functional safety and we're working with a company called Exita who's a leader in this space for functional safety for how do we bring that level of security and certification into the RHEL space when it's deployed out there at the edge? So it's an exciting space everything from the technology to the partnerships to how we engage industry verticals but this is, I'm really excited to have the red hat. I can tell, it's super excited. You know, one of the things that's interesting is that the little industry trivia as theCUBE has been around for 11 years now we've been to all the red hat events and IBM events for many, many years but I actually interviewed Arvin that's now the CEO of IBM who now owns Red Hat at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco like three years ago and he had a smile on his face and he just announced the acquisition shortly after because I was hitting with some cloud-needed questions a lot of the stuff about kind of what's hitting today and you just laid it out. RHEL, if I get this right and of course I'm connecting the dots here in real time it's an operating system that hits bare metal, open hybrid cloud, edge, public cloud and across the enterprise it's an operating system. Okay, so okay, we all know that. Okay, you apply that to a cloud operating model you have some system software. So the question, which by the way is what's going to power the next gen cloud I think is what Arvin wants and you guys hope. So the question for you Stephanie is what applications do you hope to create on top of and what do you have today that RHEL is powering because if you have great system software like RHEL that's enabling applications. I'm assuming that's cloud services, that's new cloud native take us through that part of the stack what's your vision? Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the key things that I would touch on is that it's part of the reason we build our portfolio the way we do, right? We have RHEL of course for your kind of Linux deployments that you described but RHEL Core OS is part of OpenShift and that consistency delivers into the platform and then both of those can then serve the applications that you need to deploy. And we are really excited to be able to do things like work with the transportation industry folks like Alstrom who do really bring edge capabilities all the way out into the rails of the train systems they from high speed trains to metros to monorail they have built their whole strategy on RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform it's about the platform just as you said that operating system delivering the flexibility to pull the applications on top and those applications could be anything from things that require functional safety right things like in vehicles as an example could be anything from artificial intelligence which goes out into manufacturing but having that stable platform underneath whether or not using RHEL or OpenShift that consistency it opens up the world to how applications can be deployed on it but I am super excited about what AI and machine learning out at the edge can do and what being able to bring really hardened security capabilities out to the edge what that opens up for new technologies and businesses. That's super exciting and I think the edge is a great exclamation point around any debate anyone might have had around what the distributed architecture is going to look like it's pretty clear now what the landscape is from an enterprise standpoint and given that what should people know about the edge what's the update what's the modern takeaway now that we're I mean obviously COVID has proven that there's a lot of edge applications that kind of were under forecast or accelerated working at home dealing with network security you name it it's been kind of over amplified for sure but now that COVID's kind of coming there's a light at the end of the tunnel coming to an end it's going to be still a hybrid world I mean hybrid everything not just hybrid cloud hybrid hybrid everything so edge now cannot be ignored what should people take away from Red Hat Summit this year? Absolutely I think it's the possibilities that edge can bring and there are different stages of maturity telco beautiful example of how to deploy edge and telco market as a market continues to drive the kind of pioneer what is done in edge you see a lot of embedded edge right things that you deploy or your business may deploy that is you purchase it from a company and it's more embedded as an appliance level and then there's what the enterprise will do with edge specifically for their businesses what I think you'll see is a catch up across all of these spaces that those three are complimentary right you may consume some of your edge from a partner in a full solution you may build some of your own edge as you expand your data center and distribute it and you're made leverage of course you'll leverage what's being done by the telcos so what I think you'll see is a balance in multiple types of edge being deployed and the different values that it can deliver Stephanie final question for you and thanks for taking the time great conversation and interview here for Red Hat Summit as a general manager you're constantly talking to customers I know that personally you've told me that many stories off camera but also you have to look inside the organization run the business keep an eye on the product roadmap and make sure everything's pumping on all cylinders what is the customers telling you right now and what's the common pattern that people are talking about things that they're looking to do projects they're funding and what's the most important story that we should be covering and what's the most important story people aren't talking about So I think one of the things I'm really saying as you mentioned at the beginning we've been talking about open hybrid cloud for a long time there was a period of time where hybrid cloud was happening to folks or kind of it was a bit some of developers were using it from here now hybrid cloud is intentional it is very intentional about how customers are strategically taking a view of what they deploy where how they deploy it and taking advantage of the optionality that hybrid can do so that's one of the things I'm most excited about I think that the next steps that will happen is a balancing of how do they expand that out into how do they balance a managed services addition into their hybrid cloud how do they manage that with also having VMs and a large VM deployment on-prem to me now the biggest thing that is being looked at is how do companies make these decisions in a strategic way that is kind of holistic rather than making point decisions and I am seeing that transition in the customers I talk to it's not how do I deal with hybrid cloud it's how do I make hybrid cloud work for me and really deliver value to me and how do I make those decisions as a company and honestly that requires kind of what you talked about earlier it requires within those customers to have the structure the organizational structure, the communication the transparency, the openness that you talked about that takes a strategy like open hybrid cloud a long way so it's both the people and the process and the technology coming together You know Stephanie we do so many interviews on theCUBE and you've been on so many times we go back and look back and say you know in that time that year 2010 we were talking about this I was talking to a friend and we were talking about 2015 that was the big conversation of moving to the cloud you know startups were all there born in the cloud so early generation was all about the startup cloud they all got that 2015 was like move to the cloud this year the conversation isn't about moving to the cloud it's about scale and all those enterprise requirements now that are coming from the hybrid now that that's been decided you're starting to see that operating model connect so it's not so much moving to the cloud it's I've moved to the cloud and now I got to run some now enterprise grade scale operationally what's your reaction to that? Absolutely I mean to me the I love the intentionality that I'm seeing now in customers but when it comes down to it it's about speed of deploying applications it's about having the security and the stability in order to deploy that to give you confidence in order to go out and scale it out so to me it is speed, stability and scale those three comes together and how do you pull that together with all of the choices we have today and the technologies today to deliver value and competitive differentiation? Open source is winning and you guys are doing a great job Stephanie thank you for coming on and spending so much time chatting here in theCUBE for Red Hat Summit thanks for your time Well my pleasure John good to see you Okay great to see you this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 21 virtual I'm John Furrier with theCUBE thanks for watching