 From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, with my co-host here, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Mike Ferris. He is Vice President Business Architecture at Red Hat. Thanks so much for joining us. You're welcome, glad to be here. I want to start out by talking about the Amazon announcement. We already had Jim Whitehurst on the program. He told us about the auspicious business meeting he had in Seattle, the breakfast meeting. You're a big player in how this is going to actually work in practice. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? Sure, so it's really exciting for us in that what we have done with Amazon is jointly deliver the power of the public cloud to hybrid and private clouds through OpenShift. So a lot of what we've been talking with customers over the past several decades now has actually been about how do you take enterprise software and make open source applicable to it? How do you really evolve your infrastructure and technologies in that context? And with the emergence of the public clouds, specifically Amazon, starting in 2007, 2008, customers started taking the same technologies and using them on Amazon. And we certainly grew into that model and really helped grow that evolution of customers to move to the public clouds. But what's been happening over the past couple of years is customers have been asking, now that they're looking at things like Red Hat OpenStack, starting to look at alternative deployments and even emerging into the application platforms and container platforms, how can they take a lot of the power that specifically Amazon has been developing in the public cloud side and deliver it to those applications regardless of where they run? And so between Jim's meeting, certainly with Andy Jassy, and then sitting down and talking about what types of evolution could we help grow for application developers in the on-premise and hybrid environments? It really came out that the full suite of application services that Amazon has produced really provided a good stronghold for us to be able to say to the customers, if we could provide those to you on-premise and give you the ability to scale and use innovative solutions from AWS without having to worry about different interfaces, different relationships, and actually come to Red Hat and say, OpenShift is the center for your application and container platforms. We thought it was an excellent example of saying we could take what Amazon's doing, deliver it inside OpenShift to those customers. And this is a really big revolutionary change. Can you just project out for us five years from now? Where will we be in terms of OpenShift and in terms of this partnership? So a big piece of this is actually going back to the early promises of Java and other polyglot platforms saying, if you write an application, it can run anywhere. Well, now what's happening is it's starting to come true in that with the emergence of hybrid and this concept of on and off-premise, you did have the concept that you could take an application and move it. You can move it one place to the other. Now, in having applications written to container platforms like OpenShift and having used services that may be local or may be remote in a very consistent way, you're able to take those applications and use them everywhere. So we do see this in the next several years enabling customers and applications to be much more mobile, leveraging resources, where they're best run and be able to take the platforms and have customers really, really grow the innovative solutions on-premise in the same way they've been able to do in the public clouds like AWS over the past several years. Mike, can you walk us through what the rollout of this is going to look like? When can customers get their hands on it? When's the training for all of your partners going to come? Yeah, so we're early in the phases now with AWS and you saw a demo today. We had an excellent demo with Amazon and Red Hat on stage showing the integration. You'll see early versions of it in the next couple of months and then customers will certainly be able to include that in their applications as we're deploying OpenShift. Likewise in the fall or a little bit later than that. So over the coming year, you'll see this happen in the market. Okay, great. And Andy Jassy in the video talked that there's thousands of Amazon services. How do we understand what's, it's great to say, it's great I can get Amazon in a small deployment, but the devil's in the details and how's the networking work between my on-premises stuff and the public cloud. Can you help us unpack and how do we look at this? The beauty of this is you as a developer who maybe you've become familiar with AWS services, RDS, Route 53, et cetera, it's the same services delivered through OpenShift. So your experience in understanding everything that you've learned from Amazon, maybe doing some tests within the public cloud or deploying other applications to the public cloud, it's going to look exactly the same on-premise and in the hybrid environment with OpenShift itself. So all the trainings and all the learnings that you've gone through will apply directly as well. As you start to deploy and build and deploy applications, the beauty of this, as I said, is you're going to be able to take them and use them on-premise or in the public cloud without any changes. And again, through that interface where OpenShift will provide you the configuration, the ability to deploy and manage, for example, an RDS database and have that be visible within your application in a very consistent way, even if you take it from one instance of OpenShift and move it to another. You can take the application, move it up into Amazon itself on OpenShift and it'll run exactly the same. How should customers think about how they're going to be paying for this kind of thing? I think they understand one of the things that Red Hat has done a great job is, right, I want to start doing containers. I want to start doing OpenShift. You guys have streamlined a lot of those, how the financial interactions work. You guys are subscription model as to how you do things. How do I look at this, whether I'm doing it in the public cloud, doing it on-premises? How am I going to be able to compare those two? So we're not announcing anything different in that model today. And one of my core responsibilities for Red Hat is business architecture, which really means what are the models that customers are adopting in the market, how can Red Hat respond to those and start to grow what's happening? So what we've started with AWS here is really a technical integration and a services integration, such that we will be able to help customers when they come to us with a question on their OpenShift deployment. Let's say they are using RDS and they want to understand, am I deploying it properly as it being integrated? We will have knowledge about that. But they're still going to go directly to Amazon for their financial transaction. So buy the services from who you're actually acquiring it from, but use them together wherever you deploy them. And that's really the crux of this. As we evolve, certainly we're open to looking at alternative business models if customers start to say, well, I want to acquire this everything from Red Hat or everything from Amazon. It certainly would be an option, but we're not yet there. In thinking about business models, I mean, this has been a recurring question because Red Hat's success appears to be a one-off in the open source world. Why is the open source business model so challenging? As you said, it's selling free is hard, but you're a 17 year veteran of this company. What's your perspective? So there are multiple areas, right? One of the core ones that I always speak to customers and partners alike about is that we are very, very well internally. We understand very well the difference between a product and a project. And so when we go into a technology, we always make sure that it's open source, whether we're acquiring a company, whether starting a project or joining in like we did with OpenStack, a significant existing project. But that is a technical investment. It's something that we want to make sure that we have significant, not just ownership of in the community, but individuals inside the company that are involved, invested and maintainers of projects. But then likewise, when we look at how we're going to serve as customers, we think about long-term life cycles. We think about how can we maintain our support models, our financial models, everything across that. And that's what really helps turn it into a product for them and for us specifically. And so this differentiation in talking about technology versus the business is very important to us. It does mean that we have to make some very explicit promises to customers and stick to those. Things like saying to the market that we will support our products for 10 year life cycles means that we have to be very rigorous in the testing, very rigorous in the updates, making sure that over that 10 years, we can service the customers the way that we started to, but all from that same open source project. So it's really the purity of giving back to the community, staying involved in the community, but then also focused on the customer needs and the value that our enterprise businesses want to pay us for. Like in the keynote, one of the statistics that Red Hat shared is that 59% of your customers have a multi-cloud environment. Can you share with us how your team, how you're helping customers think about that architecture, be a little bit more strategic? Our viewpoint is most customers are a lot multi-cloud because they've been very tactical and very much done in application by application where things fit, haven't necessarily, like they have forever with IT, had a grand strategy that pulls it all together. It's kind of like, oh, I need this and therefore that did or pricing was good. How are you helping customers with both advice and with architecture? So it's not something that we use a lot now, but in the early days of Red Hat, the word choice was really a core part of vocabulary, right? And so giving back to the community, let our customers be able to say, all right, I always know that what Red Hat's doing, it's in the open source community and I can always do it on my own if I choose. Well, what choice means now is being able to say back to them, well, regardless of where you're running these technologies for ones that you are paying Red Hat for, that you're buying subscriptions from us, we will make sure that they perform efficiently, that they have the appropriate security mechanisms in place and they work the same way across all the platforms that you can deploy. And that includes things such as pricing models and business models because we certainly don't want to introduce arbitrage, make it confusing for customers to acquire. Choice overload. Yeah, and so in the end, what we're really trying to do is make sure that when a customer goes out and deploys a technology from us, they can use it wherever they want, that they can get support for what they want and that they're paying a fair price across all of those. And so when we talk about multi-cloud, we're very careful about making sure that that technology works everywhere. So whether it's this integration with AWS on the services with OpenShift or whether it's just Red Hat Enterprise Linux performing very efficiently and securely across every public cloud in the world, we're making sure that we have those hooks in place everywhere. When we're thinking about the cloud industry and the future and where it's going, I know that you are a technology evangelist. You yourself have 50 patents. What is, what do you see the future holding? What will we be talking about at the Red Hat Summit 2020 and 2025? So one of my big motivations and the company's motivations is to continue to make technology easily consumable. You see this has already happened in the public clouds with Amazon being able to give people credit card transactions and start up a server literally in minutes where it used to take weeks or months for procurement. As people do this, as microservices start to emerge more, as security becomes a larger context for what they have to do in their environments to make sure that they're operating securely, our objective is to make sure that regardless of the platform that we're producing, regardless of the underlying technology, that we make it easy for them to be able to build and deploy and manage those environments everywhere. So what that may turn into and the hope certainly is that technology gets out of the way over time and customers, application developers can really focus on the innovation that ties back to their business rather than which project are they using from the community or which proprietary product that they purchased. And it really becomes about the businesses that they're in rather than technology. You talked about security being number one in the minds of customers, also privacy. We also hear that U.S. customers, just individuals, aren't as concerned about privacy and security as perhaps they should be. Do you see that following and just into the consumer group? Will the consumers take the lead of corporations? So when we talk about our enterprise customers, certainly security is a big piece of it. And if you look back when we started Redhead Enterprise Linux, a primary piece of that was making sure that we always had immediate response to security issues with our products in the market. That has continued as we've grown the portfolio to be the broad stack of solutions that we have today. What's happening now, and especially with this move toward containers, is all the value that we've built into that security mechanism into Redhead Enterprise Linux now starts to apply to the container environment. And so as really, and you think we've said this a couple of times already, containers are Linux and Linux is containers. You start to stretch that out some and that means that security is just as important, and it's actually more important in a containerized application world than it was just in Linux. So this value of being able to say to a customer, security is important, we've helped answer that question for Redhead Enterprise Linux and the other products that we produce. Now we're able to answer that as you move into the microservices world, as you start to have applications you're developing or other applications from ISVs that are containerized on Red Hat hosts in Red Hat containerized environments, security is already part of that. So it really becomes handed to the users for the end result. You've been with Red Hat for many years and we've heard kind of culture at the core of what's doing. The question I have for you is, we see just the rapid pace of change even more. How does a company like Red Hat keep up with this increasing pace? I think about how long it took Red Hat Enterprise Linux to get adoption and rollout and things like that versus OpenShift was way more recent and is coming much faster and there's just that increased pace of change. What do you see that's changed and what's the same at Red Hat for you? So sameness really goes back to our commitments to community, commitments to value and I've been here again 17 years and I will say that every individual in the company I trust and that trust, the fact that the ethical nature of the way we operate, the executive leadership of the company certainly helps me maintain that sameness across the now approaching decades that I've been to the company. How we keep up with the rapid pace of change, that's always a challenge but everyone in the company continues to look forward to how do we help mature the value that Red Hat provides and how do we make sure we maintain our completeness and integration with the open source communities. So it's the community that's driving us from a technology view and the customers as well in that context but we want to make sure that we put back to that and we continue to invest in the core DNA that really made Red Hat Linux even before Red Hat Enterprise Linux successful when it started. Mike, thanks so much for joining us, we really appreciate it. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will return with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit.