 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well, go back live here on theCUBE as we continue with the coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center Red Hat Summit 2019. Stu Minimum, John Wall's a big keynote night, by the way, we're looking forward to that, well, a preview of that coming up in our next segment and also wall-to-wall interviews of our morning from a number of our keynote presenters tonight. But right now, we are joined by Gunnar Helixen, who's Director of Product Management for Red Hat. Gunnar, nice to see you, sir. Good to see you. And Andrew Hecox, who's Director of Product Management of Insights at Red Hat. Andrew, how are you doing today? Doing great, happy to be here. Show off to a good start for you guys. Everything good to go? Yeah, it's been great. It's gotten great response from customers, great response from analysts. Everyone's really excited about the Relate GA. Andrew? Yeah, we've had overflow at all of our sessions and Insights is a hosted service. It's also nice to go live and not get any pages. So that's going great, too. Hey, it's all good there, right? Yeah. All right, so on the Relate side, big announcement today, right? It's going public now available. Right. A lot of excitement, a lot of buzz around that. And Insights has been added to that. So what is that doing now for kind of your suite of services and what you are now concerned perhaps a little more about than you were yesterday? Well, I think one of the benefits we've had in making this change is it can create a virtuous loop. So Insights as a service works by looking at the data that we have from running environments and seeing what is successful and what is not successful. So by having a smaller group of customers, we're able to deliver the service using a good experience. But as a number of customers increases, that means we can deliver more value because we have a better understanding of what the world looks like. So for us, even though we've had a really great growth rate, being able to accelerate that by putting it inside of the Rel subscription means we're going to have access to even more opportunities to look at customer data, find new insights, and deliver even more value to them. All right, so Gunnar, analytics is a piece that I'm hoping you can explain to our audience some of the new pieces that you should be looking at. Yeah, sure, so with the Insights tool, now I'll be able to write an enterprise analytics customers. They are gonna, as Andrew said, there's this now virtuous loop, right, where the more people that use it, the smarter the system gets. And the benefit for the end user is, now they get, I like to think of it as coaching. So often there are security fixes, there are opportunities for performance tuning, there's configuration fixes you can make, which may not be immediately obvious unless you've read through all the manuals, right? And so how much better is it that Andrew's service can now come into a real customer and say, hey, have you noticed that you might want to make this performance fix? Or hey, you might have forgotten this security fix. And it really makes the day-to-day life for the administrator much easier. It also allows them to scale and manage many more systems much more efficiently. Yeah, I'm curious, you know, there's certain people who are just like, wait, no, I understand my environment, you know, am I up for sharing what I'm doing versus everyone else? What's that feedback that you've been, what are some of the kind of misperceptions you want to make sure people understand, you know, what it is and what it isn't? I had a customer I talked to, he phrased it in a very funny way, he's like, well, I don't need this, but my team might. You know, those guys, they're not quite up to my level. I think actually our customers, they feel the scale that they have to operate on, so they're managing a lot more stuff. But I think the real pressure is line of business is expecting things faster. So if they can't turn around, then their line of business are going to go get technology somewhere else. And so for our customers, the ability to automate pieces of their workflow, including ensuring it's a safe configuration, it's optimized, that's a really key thing. So I've never actually had someone say, I know what, well I did once. I have one person say they knew what they're doing, they didn't need our help, but I think everyone else, they get the value of analytics. Well, you brought up the word, you know, scale. It's, you know, I worked in operations for six years and the group I had is like, okay, next quarter, next year, you're going to have more to do or less to do, and now you're going to have more or less resources. We understand what the answer is for most of those. So if I can't have automation, if I can't have smart tooling today, I'm not going to be able to keep up. We talk about it at the core of digital transformation is data needs to drive what we're doing, otherwise you're going to be left behind. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so how great it is to finally have, for 15 years we've been getting support tickets, been writing knowledge based articles, we've got all this technical expertise, all this architectural expertise, and that's not always easy to deliver to customers, right? It's still, you know, we're a software company, so we can deliver them software, but it's that additional coaching, that additional expertise is kind of difficult to deliver without having a vehicle-like insights available, right? So how does it, in terms of, let's say in real life, you roll out a new product, everyone's, you know, it's hopefully being, well, not hopefully, it is being used, right? And now you start seeing hiccups in the system. All right, you see some speed bumps along the way. What are you seeing, holistically, that an individual user is not? Or what's the value to gathering this consensus, and providing me as maybe just a single user with an insight into my situation? Yeah, the way I'd like to think about it is, if you're a customer and you have a critical issue, it causes downtime, it impacts your business, that's really terrible, and you're probably going to learn from that. You're not going to do the same thing again, at least hopefully. But the customer next door, or your competitor next door, or partner next door, they don't generate that experience, or learn from that experience. So I think of insights as a way of knowledge recapture. So if something happens once in one place, the system acts as a hub for that information. So once we see that, we can capture the information that was discovered at one customer site, and we can proactively alert all of our customers to avoid that scenario. So it really lets us reuse knowledge that we're generating. As Gunner said, this expertise we're generating inside the company, we're already doing all these activities, but it lets us recapture that energy and stick it back out to the rest of our customers much more efficiently than we ever could before. And you can deal, you deal one-on-one. So if I'm a unique, or have a unique problem, then you can help me identify that, and then you keep it in a reservoir, basically, that could be tapped into when other instances occur, and you could see, oh, this happened, this particular situation occurred in this situation, and boom, here's the cause, here's the fix. And everything we do with Insights is totally, so we learn from different experiences, but it's totally tailored to each environment. So it's not just like a whole bunch of knowledge-based articles, it looks at exact configuration for each customer, not only verifies that they're really gonna hit the issue, not just they might or something, but they're really gonna hit it, but also generates automation to fix the issue. So we generate customizable playbooks, which is an automation language that Right Hat obviously is invested in, and our customers and community love, that is specific to their environment, so they can go from discovery to fix in the safest and fastest way possible. Yeah, you went, I was, you know, I'm hearing automation, and of course, immediately think about Ansible there. So it seems there, is that a tight integration? Do they just play across each other? How does that dynamic work? Sure, so Insights is tightly integrated in the sense of, I think of Ansible as arms and legs, like they can go do things for you, but it doesn't come with a brain necessarily. The brain is our customers, right? So Ansible's so easy to use that you can put in the hands of knowledge experts inside of different companies, and they can automate parts of their job that are tedious. That's fantastic. What we're doing with Insights though, is say, well, we've got the Red Hat brain as well though, and so we're gonna connect the Red Hat brain in, and so we're using tools like Ansible to help collect the information that we need to analyze the environment, and then tools like Ansible to go resolve the issues once we've identified what's there. So we see there's totally complementary pieces of the portfolio. So, God, we've been talking about customers, about you on the inside. What are you getting out of this, ultimately in terms of product improvement and whatever iterations that you're going to bring on because of these Insights that you're gathering? I would assume, you know, you kind of hope you roll it out and everything's fine. Right? Yeah, that's right, yeah. You hope you don't get much from Andrew, but it's inevitable that, you know, there's going to be something that needs attention. Well, I mean, this is just part and parcel of regular product management practice, right? I mean, you look at your support tickets, you look at what customers are worried about, you look at what the escalations are, and that helps you. I think one change that we have gone through is the analysis of all that activity has been largely anecdotal. Like you always remember the last and loudest person who was yelling at you, right? And tools like Insights allow us to be much more data-driven as we're making different product management decisions. Okay. All right, yeah, so what should we be looking for to give us a little bit of where things go from here? Sure, no good. So, you know, I think we'll see the service generally, as I said, as we get more people connected, the service itself increases in quality in terms of recommendations and the breadth of recommendations. We're also starting to do some interesting work to open it up to partners. So, so far it's really been a red hat oriented, here's red hats knowledge, but it turns out that our partners want their stuff to run successfully on top of our platforms. That's a huge value for them. And so, for example, we have nine new recommendations that we'll provide for SQL Server when running on RHEL 8 that we generated in partnership with Microsoft, and that's certainly the type of thing that we want to keep investing more in, and I think is really impactful for our customers because they see vendors actually working together to create a solution for them instead of us each doing our own thing in different ways. So, that's one change that we're really excited about going forward. Yeah, I think focusing on the coaching for specific workloads is going to be really important. I mean, optimizing the operating system is great. I'm a huge operating system nerd, I love fixing the operating system, but customers really, the operating system is an instrumental step towards actually operating something that is critical to the customer's business. And so, to the extent that we can connect infrastructure providers, ISVs, and all the entire partner ecosystem together with the indigenous operating system rules, we can give customers really a very nice view and a very nice set of, well, coaching on their full stack of their deployment. And that's the insight they're all looking for, right? Literally, that's what they're looking for. Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you. For the time, we appreciate your time here today, and good luck with continued PAC sessions. That goes well for you both. Appreciate it. Back with more, we're at Red Hat Summit, we're in Boston, and you are watching The Cube. Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, and we're covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat.