 from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here with theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020, the global experience reaching all the participants of the event where they are. I'm happy to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Mike Ferris, who is the vice president of corporate development and strategy at Red Hat. Mike, it's great to see you. Likewise, Stu, happy to be here. All right, so, Mike, lots of things to talk about. A few weeks back, of course, the management changes happened. We're fresh off of Red Hat Summit. I had a pleasure really talking to a lot of your peers, your new boss and many of the customers. But for our Think audience, bring us up to speed. Back in 2019, of course, the largest software acquisition ever completed with IBM buying Red Hat and there have been some management changes, some people switching roles and you've got a new title. So bring our audience up to speed. Sure, absolutely. So it's been an exciting several months as we've gone through this, of course. We knew things were going to happen, things were announced clearly with Ginny's retirement quite a while ago. But certainly, the Arvin announcement and then as well as having both Jim Whitehurst become president and Paul Cormier becoming CEO of Red Hat. It's been an exciting several months trying to go through this and understand what would change and frankly, what would not change? I'll say from Red Hat's perspective, having been with Red Hat for coming up here on 20 years, not a lot has really changed. We're still focused on our mission of being the leading enterprise open source software company, focusing on both taking our platforms, both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and now OpenShift, forward in the market, partnering around middleware components, partnering around our management as well as our storage elements. So our mission hasn't changed and that's kind of one of the key aspects of this. I'll say that certainly with Arvind now as CEO of IBM and Jim Whitehurst as president of IBM along with Paul Cormier being CEO of Red Hat, we've got a really strong leadership group in place at IBM that understands what Red Hat is, what we mean to the customer and just as importantly, what we mean to the open source community and that type of action and drive is certainly something that we think that leadership in place will help ensure that the value we've delivered to customers, frankly from day one, back when we launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Advanced Server, frankly, is something that we'll be able to continue to do and drive in the community and with the customers as we move forward. Yeah, Mike, it's interesting. When we look out on the ecosystems and what's happening out there, we understand for customers sometimes, it might be challenging to say, hey, I listened to 10 different vendors and they all say the same words. I've got multi hybrid cloud, digital modernization, things like that. With our hat as an analyst firm, we kind of say, okay, everybody does things a little bit different. If you look at the big cloud players, they're all playing different games. When we looked at the IBM strategy pre-acquisition of Red Hat and Red Hat, they'd line up pretty well. Red Hat very much at Summit, it was open hybrid cloud. When I look at IBM, maybe a little bit more talk of multi cloud than hybrid cloud, but hybrid is long been a piece of it. So, give us a little bit of the inside with your strategy hat on it. How much had it been strong alignment? Obviously, IBM and Red Hat have partnered for decades, but there are some places where you need to make sure that people understand that Red Hat still has a place and partners with all the clouds. And of course, IBM has services that span many places, but they also have products and services that are particular to IBM things. Absolutely, and I think it's important to note, and this is well-established, that one of the core justifications and reasons for the acquisition was really around Red Hat's position, not just an open source, but in hybrid cloud. We've been talking about that for many years, in fact, before most of the vendors in the industry picked it up. But just as importantly, I think if you look back at Arvin Krishna's announcements on frankly the day that he was named CEO, he starts talking about things like IBM's focus being hybrid and AI, and how do those things come together and who are the participants in that value being delivered? Certainly from Red Hat's perspective, as we've said, we've been talking about hybrid and delivering on hybrid for many years now, now that's being pushed as part of the IBM overall message. And so certainly being able to leverage that value and extend it throughout the ecosystem that IBM brings throughout the software that IBM has and their services, certainly we think we've got a good opportunity to really take that message much broader in the market. Again, with both Paul and Jim, president and CEO of Red Hat working together, we'll be able to take that and leverage that capability throughout all of IBM generally. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the AI piece, Mike, because one of the things that really struck me at the summit is often we're talking about platforms and we're talking about infrastructure. And while that is my background, we understand that the reason infrastructure exists is because it's about application. And one of the most important pieces of applications are data. So Red Hat, of course, has a strong history with ties to applications and data. You've got an operating system as one of the core pieces of what you're doing. And when I think about IBM and its strengths, well, the first thing I probably think of is services, but the second thing I think of is all the business productivity, the databases, all these applications that IBM has created over the years. So, I'm wondering if we can just click down one notch and you talk about hybrid cloud and AI and everything. How are IBM and Red Hat helping customers build all of those new applications, go through those transformations to really be modern enterprises? Yeah, so certainly if you look at Red Hat's history, we focused very much on building the platforms. And again, whether that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift or JBoss, our focus has been, how can we make a standardized platform that will work across the industry, regardless of use case or industry vertical? IBM has both platforms, as well as a lot of investment capabilities in the higher level value services, as well as specializations and use of these applications and platforms for specific vertical industries. And a lot of what they've been able to bring to the table with their investments in Watson and AI, as well as a lot of their data services has certainly start to come to fruition. And when we start taking these two in combination and applying, for example, a focus on developers, developer tools, being able to bring value to not just the operations folks, but also the developer side, and really put a lot of the AI capabilities across that, we're starting to see accelerated value, accelerated use. And then if you layer that on top of a hybrid approach, we've got a very strong message that crosses everything from existing applications to new applications people are developing from their DevOps cycle all the way through their operation cycle at the bottom end where they're actually trying to deploy this across multiple platforms, multiple infrastructures and keep everything consistently managed, secured and operated. And that's really the overall message that we're seeing as we talk about this together with IBM. All right, so, Mike, you touched on some of the products that Red Hat offers in the portfolio. It was a real focus at Summit, not really to talk about the announcements, a week before Summit, Rel 8.2 came out, OpenShift 4.4 wasn't a big hoop lob, but give us the update on really the Red Hat portfolio and where are those touch points that IBM is helping Red Hat scale? Yeah, so certainly you've touched on some of the big ones, right? OpenShift itself with the 4.4 release brings a lot of new capabilities that are being brought forward to those customers. We have a better management, better capabilities and what they can do from monitoring, service, et cetera. But certainly also things like what we're doing with OpenShift virtualization, which was another announcement there where we're actually bringing a game changing capability to the market and enabling customers that have both existing virtualized environments and also new or migrated or transformed container native environments and running those on the same platform with the same management infrastructure. We see that as huge to be able to simplify the management capabilities, understand costs better and be able to control those environments in a much more consistent way. Secondly, one of the big things that's been happening is really around advanced container management, or we're calling it ACM. This is a good example of how Red Hat and IBM have worked together to bring existing IBM capabilities and what they had called multi-cluster management or MCM and bring those not just into Red Hat as part of our platforms, but also have Red Hat take the step of open sourcing that and making part of the industry standard through open source communities. So being able to take that type of value that IBM had matured, take it through Red Hat into the open source community but simultaneously deliver it to our customers of OpenShift and make it part of the platform is something we really see as a huge value at. We're also doing a lot more with hyperscalers, especially in the space of OpenShift managed services. You saw some of those last week and I would encourage everyone to go out and look at the Paul Cormier and Scott Guthrie announcements that we did. There was a keynote video that you can go review but certainly to focus on how do we work with these hyperscalers inclusive of IBM to make OpenShift a much more fluid deployment option, have it more service oriented both on-premise and off-premise so that customers can actually work together better in it. Yeah, Red Hat I think has always done a really good job of highlighting those partnerships. It's way easy on the outside to talk about the competitive nature of the industry and who fights who. I remember a few years ago Red Hat made a strong partnership announced with AWS. You mentioned Scott Guthrie for Microsoft. Well, not Satya Nadella up on stage like it was the summit last year but Microsoft long partner of course with IBM back to the earliest days and with Red Hat for, you know in the much more recent days that there's this partnership. So critically important, ACM definitely an area we want to watch. It was really a question we had had if you looked at last year Microsoft announced Azure Arc that lots of solutions announced as to how am I going to manage in this multi-cloud world because it's not my pieces everywhere. Now I need to manage a lot of things that are out of my control and from different vendors. And hopefully we learned a lot of the lessons from the multi-vendor era that will be fixed in the multi-cloud era. Absolutely and you know, Arc was part of our discussion with Scott Guthrie last week or Paul's discussion as you'll see a demo of that. But I would also expect that you'll see more things coming from us with partners as well, right? You know, this is about building a platform a hybrid platform that works in a multi-cloud world and being able to describe that in a very consistent way, manage it, secure it, entitle it in a very consistent way across all the vendors inclusive of both self and managed service deployment options. And so we're very focused on doing that. IBM certainly assisting in that, helping grow it. But overall this focus is really a red house perspective about making that hybrid platform, the leading hybrid platform, the leading Kubernetes platform in the industry. And that's really we're starting from with OpenShift. All right, so Mike we started out the discussion talking about some of the changes and where Red Hat stays, Red Hat and where the companies are working together. Obviously the leadership changes were a big piece. Congratulations, you got a new role. I've seen quite a few people with some new titles, which is always nice to see the people that have been working for a long time. The other area where it seems from the outside there's a coordinated effort is around the COVID response. So, you know, seeing the public letters from Arvind Krishna, of course, seeing Red Hat and Paul Cormier's letter to the employees there. IBM was one of the first companies that we had heard from that said, hey, you know, we're not going to RSA conference this year. We're moving digital with the events. So, you know, real focus on the employees and then of course supporting customers. So, you know, how does that COVID response happen? And am I right from the outside that it looks like there is a bit of a united front to help attack this global pandemic response? It is, you know, I think there's two levels to this. Certainly between Red Hat and IBM, we're well coordinated. Within Red Hat, we have teams that are specifically dedicated to making sure that our associates, and more importantly, our customers and the overall communities are well served through this. As you said earlier in the interview, certainly we pulled back on any significant product announcements at Summit, including with some of our partners merely because we wanted to maintain this focus on how can we help everyone through this very unfortunate experience? And so, you know, as obviously a lot of us, all of us are sitting at home now globally. The focus is very much, how do we stay connected? How do we keep the business flowing as much as possible through this and keep people safe and secure in their environments and make sure that we serve both the customers and the associates best possible way. So there's a lot of sensitivity and we want to make sure that, you know, the industry and the overall world knows that we're very focused on keeping people healthy and moving forward as we work through this together as a world. Yeah, well, Mike Farris, thank you so much for the updates. It's been a pleasure catching up with you. Great, thanks Stu, appreciate it. All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from IBM Think 2020, the global digital experience on Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.