 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Three weeks we're here covering re-invent. It's virtual, we're not in person. Normally we are on the floor extracting the signal from the noise, but we're virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. We are theCUBE virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great interview here today. Satish Balakrishnan, Vice President of Hosted Platforms for Red Hat, joining us. Satish, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thank you, John, great to see you again. I wish we were in person, but we're remote because of the pandemic, but it's going to be a lot of action going on, a lot of content. Red Hat's relationship with AWS, this is a really big story this year at many levels. One is your relationship with Red Hat, but also the world's evolved, clearly hybrid clouds in play. Now you've got multiple environments with the edge and other clouds around the corner. This is a huge deal, hybrids validated, multiple environments with including the edge. This is big on premise in the cloud. What's your new update for your relationship? No, absolutely, John, yeah, this is, you know, if anything, this year is accelerated digital transformation, right? The joke that COVID-19 is the biggest digital accelerator, digital transformation accelerator is no joke. But I think going back to our relationship with AWS, right, as you rightly pointed out, we have a very storied and long relationship with AWS. We've been with AWS, partnering with AWS since 2007, when we offered the Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS, since then, you know, we've made a lot of strides with the, you know, adding the middle-world products that are later on AWS, as well as back in 2015, we offered OpenShift dedicated, Red Hat OpenShift dedicated, which is our managed offering on AWS, you know? And since then, we've made a bunch of announcements, around the service broker and then, you know, the operators, operator hub and the operators that AWS has for services to be accessed from Kubernetes, as well as, you know, the new exciting joint service that we are now, so, you know, by AWS and Red Hat, increasingly, right, our leaders in public cloud and hybrid cloud and are approached by IT decision makers who are looking for, you know, guidance around changing requirements and, you know, how they should be doing application development and very containerized on hybrid cloud world. So, you know, excited to be here, you know, and this is a great event, you know, three-week event, but, you know, usually we were doing last week, I guess, but, you know, this week, this year, we will do it all virtual, but, you know, nevertheless, the same excitement and, you know, I'm sure there's going to be same set of announcements that are going to come out of this event as well. Yeah, we'll keep track of it. Because it's digital, I think it's going to be a whole nother user experience, especially on the discovery side, it's a learning conference, but that's great stuff. I want to dig into the news, because I think the relevant story here that you just talked about, I want to dig into the announcement, the new offering that you have with AWS, it's a joint offering, I believe. Can you take a minute to explain what was, what's discussed? Could you guys announce some stuff in May? Now you have OpenShift services. Is it on AWS? Can you take a minute to explain the news here? Absolutely, John. Yeah, so I think we have a really big announcement in May, you know, the first joint offering with AWS, it is Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. It's a joint service with Red Hat and AWS. We are very excited to partner with them and be on the AWS console. And it's great to be working with AWS engineering team, we're making a lot of really good strides. It just amplifies our managed services story. So we are very excited to have that new offering that's going to be completely integrated at the AWS console, transacted through the AWS marketplace, but customers will get all the benefit of AWS service, like, you know, have just launched it off the console, basically get, you know, be part of the enterprise discount program. And, you know, we're very excited. And, you know, the kind of interest has been really, really amazing. So we just announced that, you know, it's in preview. We have a lot of customers already in preview and we have a long list of customers that are waiting to get on this program. So with this offering, right, we have three ways in which you can consume OpenShift on AWS. So one is, as I mentioned previously, OpenShift dedicated on AWS, which we've had since 2015. Then we have OpenShift Container Platform, which is a premier self-managed offering that's been available on AWS also since 2015. And then of course, this new service, the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS. So there's multiple ways in which customers can consume AWS and leverage the power of both OpenShift and AWS. And what I want to do here as well, right, is to take a moment to explain, you know, what Red Hat's been doing in managed services because you know, it's not very natural for somebody to say, oh, what's Red Hat doing in managed services? You know, Red Hat believes in choice, right? We're all about choice, whether it's infrastructure, footprint, it's public cloud on-prem, it's managed or self-managed. That's also a choice we've offered to customers. And we've been doing managed services since 2011. That's kind of like a puzzling statement. People will be like, what? And yeah, it is true that we've been doing this since 2011. And in fact, we are one of the earliest providers of managed Kubernetes since 2015, right? I think there's only one other provider other than us who has been doing managed Kubernetes since then, which is kind of really a testament to the engineering work that Red Hat's been doing in Kubernetes. And with all that experience and all the work that we've done upstream and building Kubernetes and making Kubernetes really the hybrid cloud platform for the entire IT industry, we're excited to bring this joint offering. So we can bring all the engineering and the management strengths as well as combined with the AWS infrastructure and the AWS teams to bring this offering because this is really going to help our customers as they move to the cloud. That's great insight. Thanks for explaining that managed service. I was going to ask that question, but you hit it already. But I want to just follow up on that. Can you just do a deeper dive on the offering specifically on what the customer benefits are here from having this managed service? Because again, you said, you know, Red Hat's got multiple choice consumption vehicles here. What's the benefits? What's under the, what's the deep dive? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a really, really good question, right? As I mentioned, first thing is choice, right? We start with choice, customers, if they want self-managed and they can always get that anywhere in any infrastructure footprint. If they're going to the cloud, most customers tend to think that, you know, I'm going to the cloud because I want to consume everything as a service. And that's when all of these services come into play. But before we even get to the customer benefits, there's a lot of advantages to our software product as well, right? As a managed service, we are actually customer zero. So we go through this entire iteration, right? And you probably, everybody's familiar with how we take open source projects and we pull them into enterprise product. But we take it as second step after we make it an enterprise product, we actually ship it to our multi-tenant software system which is called OpenShift Online, which is publicly available to millions of customers where it's exposed on the public internet and you know, all the security challenges that we have to face through and fix helps solidify the product. And then we move it onto our single-tenant OpenShift dedicated or, you know, soon to be the Red Hat OpenShift service on AWS, but you know, pretty much all of Red Hat's mission-critical applications like Quade.io, it's a service that's serving like a billion containers, billion containers a month. So that scale is already being felt by the new newly shipped product so that, you know, any challenges we have at scale, any challenges we have security, any bugs that we have fixed before we really make the product available to all our customers. So that's kind of a really big benefit to just the software in general with us being a provider of the software. The second thing is, you know, since we are actually now managing customers clusters, we exactly know, you know, our customers are getting stuck, which parts of the stack need to improve. So there's a really good product gap anticipation. So, you know, as much as, you know, we still will engage with customers and we continue to engage with customers but we can also see the telemetry and the metrics and figure out, you know, what challenges are customers facing and how can we improve. Other thing that, you know, helps us with this whole thing is since we are operators now and all our customers are really operators of our software, it gives us better insights into what the user experience should be and how we can do things better. So there's a whole lot of benefit that Red Hat gets out of just being a managed service provider because, you know, drinking our own champagne really helps us, you know, polish the champagne and make it really better for all our customers that are consuming it. I always love the champagne better than dog food because champagne tastes better. Great, great, great insight. Final question, we only have a couple of minutes left, only two minutes left. So take the time to explain the big customer macro trend which is the on-premise-to-cloud relationship. We know that's happening. It's an operating model on both sides, that's clear as it is in the industry, everyone knows that. But the managed services piece. So what drives an organization to transition from an on-prem Red Hat cloud to a managed service that I've been on? It was a really good question. It does have many things, right? And it really starts with the IT and technology strategy that the customer has. You know, it could be like a digital transformation pushed from the CEO. It could be a cloud-native development from the CTO or it could just be a containerization or cost optimization. So you have to really figure out, you know, which one of this and it could be multiple and many customers. It could be all four of them and many customers that's driving the move to the cloud and driving the move to containerization with OpenShift. And also customers are expanding into new businesses. They got to be more agile. They got to basically protect that stuff because, you know, there are a lot of competitors, you know, the Airbnb and other analogies, you know, how they take on the big hotel chains. Instead of, you know, customers have to be agile. IT is, you know, very strategic in these days. You know, given how everything is digital and as we, as I pointed out, right? That's COVID's really like the number one digital transformation accelerator. So for example, you know, we have BMW is a great customer of ours that uses OpenShift for all their connected car infrastructure. So they run it out of, you know, they're data centers and, you know, they suddenly want to go to a new GSA in Asia. You know, they may not have the speed to go build a data center and do things. So they'll just move to the cloud very easily. And from an overall strategy, you know, I think the world is hybrid. You know, there's going to be either single cloud, multi-cloud, on-prem. It's going to be multiple things that customers have. So they have to really start thinking about what are the compliance requirements? What is the data regulations that they need to comply to? Is it a lift and shift? Are they going to just take things or they need to do cloud native development as well as containerization to get the speed out of moving to the cloud? And then how are they measuring availability? You know, are they close to the customer? You know, what is the metrics that they have for, you know, speed to the customer as well as, you know, what databases are they using? So we have a lot of experience with this because, you know, this is something that, you know, we've been advocating, you know, for at least eight years now the open hybrid cloud. We have a lot of experience with open innovation labs, which is our way of telling customers. It's not just about the technology, but also about how you change processes and how you change other things. You know, people aspects of it, as well as container adoption programs and a bunch of other programs that Red Hat has been building to help customers with this transformation. Yeah, it's a speed game, one of the big themes of all my interviews this week, couple of weeks here at re-invent has been speed. And BMW, what a great client. You know, shifting into high gear with BMW with open shift, you know, little slogan there, you know, free attribute. Really good one, thank you, John. Shifting into high gear, you know, open shift. Congratulations and great, great announcement. I love the direction. I've always been a big fan of open shift. I think with Kubernetes a couple of years ago, when that kind of came together, you saw everything kind of just snap into place with you guys, so congratulations. Satish, final question. What is the top story that people should take away from you this year here at re-invent? What's the number one message that you'd like to share real quick? Yeah, I think number one is, you know, we have a joint service coming soon with AWS. It is one of its kind both for us and for AWS. It's the first time that we are partnering with them at such a deep level. So this is going to really help accelerate our customers move to the cloud, right, to the AWS cloud and leverage all of the AWS services very natively, like they would if they were using another container service that's coming out of AWS and it's like a joint service. I'm really, really excited about the service because, you know, we've just seen the interest has been exploding and, you know, we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AWS and working together and, you know, helping our customers, you know, move to the cloud as well as cloud native development, internalization and digital transformation in general. Congratulations. OpenShift on AWS, big story here. OpenShift service on AWS. I want to make sure that, you know, we comply with the brand. OpenShift on, OpenShift service on AWS. Got it. On AWS is a pretty big thing. Yeah, and the ecosystem everyone knows that's a super high distinction. On AWS is a certain, the highest form of compliment that they have, joint engineering, everything else going on. Congratulations. Thanks for coming. Thank you, John. They're talking to you. It's theCUBE virtual coverage. We got theCUBE virtual covering, reinvent three weeks. We got a lot of content, wall-to-wall coverage, CUBE virtualization, we got multiple cubes out there with streaming videos. We're doing a lot of Simulive, all kinds of action. Thanks for watching theCUBE.