 Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage of AnsibleFest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman, analyst with SiliconANGLE theCUBE. Our next two guests, Tom Anderson, Ansible's product owner at Red Hat is part of the Ansible platform, automation platform they announced, and Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. We had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the Ansible automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers who've come to us a lot over the last little while and said, hey, we're maturing, we're moving along the automation maturity curve, right? And we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation or doing security automation, what have you? And they're coming to us and saying, help us, give us kind of the story, if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that we kind of feel the pull for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that, this task or that task to much more of a platform-centric. It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And if you look at the numbers, six million plus activations on GitHub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be a much more broader scope now, to bring more things together. What's the rationale behind it? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? What's the plan? The main thing is automations got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. I'm a database administrator, I'm a CIS admin, I'm a middleware, I'm an app dev. And those people then would do tasks inside their job. But now we're getting to the point of actually, anybody that can see a piece of technology can automate piece of technology. And the clouds have shown this is the way to go forward with the thing. But how do we bring that, not just in places where it's being created from scratch and new, how do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years of a heritage in their IT estate. And how do you deal with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you've got to be able to automate across both of those areas and try and keep, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organizational effectiveness. How do I get to the point where the organization can be effective, as opposed to just doing things that make my job easier? And that's what we're trying to bring with applying automations, the capability that anybody can take advantage of. Yeah, Richard, I actually felt the keynote demo this morning and did a nice job of that. The line that they set it up with is this is a toolset that all the various roles and teams just get it. And it's not the old traditional, okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, oh, I've gotten the notification and then some feedback loops and we huddle for something and it gets done rather fast. It's not magic, it's still, when I get a certain piece done, okay, I need to wait for it to actually be up and running. But you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration almost with the tool driving those activities together. And that's why yesterday I said that focus on, collaboration is a great thing. All teams need to be able to do that to be more successful because you get more inclusivity, you get more inputs. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. And you want to make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're effective at what they're trying to do. Okay, take a minute to explain what's in the platform first because Ansible Engine and Tower are in there. What else is in there? What's new? What are customers going to see that's new that's different? Okay, so the new components are automation hub. There's collections, which is a technology inside Ansible itself and also automation analytics. All right, and the key thing is that Engine and Tower are still the beating heart of the platform. But then it's about building the body around the outside. So automation hub is about discover abilities like what can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Analytics is about the post-activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work. Well, how did it go? Who did what? Who did how much of what? How well did it work? How much did it fail to succeed? And then once you build on that, you then start to expand that into other areas. So what KPIs, how much of what I do is automated versus not automated. You can start to instigate other aspects of business change then. A gamification amongst teams. Who's the closest and most adherent to the strategy? You know, an input source to how possible it is. We find out what's working, right? Essentially, and there's a sharing mechanism, too, for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening. And how is my platform performing? Which areas are performing well? Which areas might not be performing well? And then as we move down the road, kind of how am I performing against my peers? How are other organizations that are automating using the Ansible Automation Platform doing? And am I keeping up? Am I doing better? That kind of stuff. So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about there. Platform feels like it builds on, yet does change the dynamic a little bit when you talk about the Automation Hub and collections. You've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us through a little bit what led to all these announcements and where you expect, how will this change the dynamics of the community? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and let Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content, their Ansible Automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users. And what the collections does as part of the platform is allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform, but yet having content be able to rev fast. And our partners love that idea because they can develop content, create content, get into their users' hands faster. So partners like F5 and Microsoft that you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors and they've been part of the pull for us to get to the platform. And then from a customer perspective, and the thing I love most about doing this job with a glass of customers is because I was a customer and I was the Ansible customer and then I came over to this side and I now go out and see customers, I see what they've done and I go, oh, that's what I wanted to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And as you start to see those, what people are starting to achieve. And like we said yesterday, it's moved away from should I automate, to how would I automate more and what should I automate. And so we're starting to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's as many different ways people do this as our different customers. You know what's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula. First of all, congratulations. And it's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market because it's not just a niche configuration management anymore. Automations become with Cloud 2.0, a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community, customers adopting, and then ecosystem. That seems to be the successful form in these kinds of growth, growth waves that you guys are experiencing. What is the partner angle? You mentioned S5, Microsoft, because that to me is going to be a tipping point and a tell sign for you guys because you got the community, you got the customers, that's check, check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on there? So you're absolutely right. So you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform. And for us, I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F5 collection, plugged it into a workflow and they were automating. What our partners experience through their customers is, look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi-cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment, I've got automation from AWS, I've got Azure automation, I've got VMware automation, I've got F5, I've got Cisco, I've got Palo Alto, I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together. And the customers are coming and telling those vendors, look, we don't want to use your automation tool and this automation tool in that one. We want to use Ansible as the common substrate if you will, automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, hey, I was out at the F5 Aspire last week and they're all in on Ansible. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much they're in on Ansible and how much they're being driven by their customers. When they do Ansible workshops with F5, they say the attendance is amazing. So they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us and that's driving our platform kind of usability across the scale. Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers that they're partners that are actually doing the work to work with Ansible, is that they're seeing it as a change also in how they, it's no longer like an individual customer inside an individual day center because everything's so much more open and so much more visible. There's value in them making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing and also the fact that then scales across those customers as well because they have their internal teams doing the same things. And so bringing them to an automation capable of like Ansible and then we have to push that means that they also gain some, the customer's appreciation for them making it easier to do their task in collaboration with us. And the best collaborations we've got with some of our partners are all initiated by customers saying, hey, I want you to go and get Ansible content. So the customers are driving a lot of the behavior in the ecosystem. Correct. On the, just another point we've been hearing a lot in the security side, separate sector, but cybersecurity, a lot of customers are building teams internally, dev teams, building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers, hey, support my APIs. So now you're starting to see more of an API integration point. Is that something that is going to be something that you guys are going to be doubling down on? What's the approach there? How does a partner connect and scale with the customers? So Ansible security automation, which is automation connecting IPS, EPS, that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did in the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansible network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exact, we see the exact same thing in the security automation space. Set compliance aside over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's resilient, IBM's resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and all of that kind of stuff. The same trajectory as the network automation. It's the exact same trajectory. We're just running the same play and it's working out great. Now we're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve and we have partners jumping in with us. Yeah, as you're talking to customers, we've heard certain stories, how I got a thousand hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those hero stats or anything along those lines? Talk about analytics maybe. Yeah, so without any analytics side on, I mean, those things start to become possible and one of the things we've been doing is turning on more metrics and it's actually really about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can do that work for all the customers rather than how to do it all themselves. Then you start to build up those pictures and we've started with a few different areas but as we advance with those and start to see how people use them and start having that conversation with customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's going to be very possible. You know, and it's- It's so important, I think it was laid out here nicely that automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven, that's going to drive them forward. Any good customer examples you have of that outcomes? No, you're talking to a lot of them. RBS one from this morning. Yeah, so I mean, RBS up this morning and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000, you know, from launch to the end of the year that 100,000 changes through their platform. And this year so far they've done a million. So, and that, you know, from my recollection that's about the same timeframe on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, you know, how many times, you know, we're talking to some customers yesterday, what used to take eight hours to do a DR test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend, now takes 12 minutes for two people and they're basically just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything's worked. You know, that type of, you can't get away from that type of change. The JPMorgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, the time savings and, I mean, people are, I mean, this legit times, I mean, people are talking on serious order of magnitude timesavings. So that's awesome. The thing I want to ask you guys next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base where it's the same problem being automated across all over the place. So playbooks become kind of key. As that starts to happen, is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you kind of help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise, whether it's I'm decentralized or centralized or I'm organized, I'll problem getting more gear. I'm getting more cloud, I'm getting more operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly 5G, IOTs coming around the corner, image and security. All this is expanding. There'll be more touch points. Automation seems to be the killer app for this. Automating those mundane tasks, but also identifying new things. Well, can you guys comment on that? Yeah, so maybe I'll start Rich and you can jump in, which is a little bit around, particularly in those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something using Ansible and then being able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else in the organization. So that idea of for them to be able to curate their automation content that they've created. Maybe they've pulled something down from Galaxy, maybe they've got something from our Automation Hub and they've made it their own. And now they want to curate that and spread it across their organization to either obviously become more efficient but also enforce standards. That's where Automation Hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certified content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across their organization. Yeah, and I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that, you know, I call it discoverability, so how do I go and find what I want? And then the next day after you've run the automation, you then got the, unless you say, well, who's using the right corporate approved roles? Who's using the same set of roles from the team that builds the standards to make sure you've got a compliant build? You know, again, showing the demo, that SysAdmin has his way of doing it, puts a security baseline application on top and you go, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time? So you can both impose the security standards in the way the build works, but you can also validate that everybody's actually doing the security standards. You know what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing and I think this came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it in some of the community conversations, is there's a social construct here going on, is a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a Slack channel and seeing if the servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the companies because you have people from different geographies, you have champions driving change and there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people. Whether they're siloed or decentralized, so there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of this substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? Are you planning for it? Are you doubling down on it? I think so and we talk about community and how important that is. But how do you create that community internally? And so Ansible's like the catalyst. So most of the teams don't necessarily need to understand in their current day jobs, Git and all the DevOps focus tools for the next generation. But then you bring Ansible because they want to automate and suddenly they go, okay, now I need to understand source control, I need to understand versioning, I need to understand how to do Git pulls and pull requests and this and so on and so forth. And it changes that provides the sort of the catalyst for them to focus on what change they have to make about how they work. Because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think Bart from Microsoft hit on that yesterday, I don't know if you saw Bart's session, but their network engineer is having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development life cycles, right? And starting to manage those things in repos and think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to that. But once they're over that kind of hump and understand that the Ansible language itself is simple and an operations person and admin can use it, no problem. He said it himself, didn't he? My network engineers have become network developers. Yeah, it's funny, I've been watching and talking to a bunch of customers, they all have their automation journey that they're going through. And when I hear the gamification, I'm like, okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach and it unlocks capabilities in the community along the way? Maybe that could built in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe it's swag based. If you get to certain level, we'll send you some t-shirts. Nice work environment when you're not talking about the servers down on some Slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. So that's the shift, that's what I'm seeing. Going from firefighting to being able to do. Or throwing bombs at each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Playing wars and on. When I was going through this myself and I used to talk to a lot of the different teams and the dev teams and the ops teams and I'd say it would be nice if these teams didn't have to talk to you and complain about something that hadn't worked or was misconfigured or it was just like, I just like to talk to you because you're my friend or you're my colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated so it's consistent and it's repeatable. That's a nice way, it can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. And I think that adds an interesting dynamic to it. Well, on our survey, our customer base and our community, one of the four things that came up was happier employees because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self-actualize in their job. And that becomes an interesting, it's not just a check box in some HR manual. It's actually real impact. And I think the customers who we've heard talk, the RBS gentleman this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job and what we've heard from everybody is that's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that are more proactive to it. You've heard that in big data. The automation thing is ridiculous. I mean, I've heard that. I didn't use it yesterday. My little joke comment with that is when I try to explain to my father what I do and he just said, well, in the 1970s, they said that computers, I mean, would all do a two-day week. And that hasn't come true either, right? So that's what I'm talking about. You trade your beeper in for a phone and you're on full of chatbots. Yeah, it comes through with red hat, by the way. Richard, thanks for coming on and sharing the insight. Thanks for unpacking the Ansible automation platform. It's one of the features. And congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, John. Thank you very much. We'll be following you guys. It's theCUBE coverage here in Atlanta. I'm John Horvitz, Stu Miniman. Debuts are day two of CUBE coverage after this short break.