 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live from San Diego. Sunny San Diego, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman today and Stu and I are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Peter Spragata, distinguished engineer from Red Hat, Peter, welcome. Thank you, I'm really excited to be here. We're excited to have you here too. I'd like to say welcome to the sun. It's pretty toasty in here. We're in this very cool sales pavilion, which is very nice and bright, so we've got a lot of bright, but we do have some heat. So you've been with Cisco, Cisco, no. I actually was with Cisco for a period of time, so there you go. It's like two degrees at Kevin Bacon, anywhere in this room, right? You've been with Red Hat since the Ansible acquisition. One of the things that was funny that Chuck Robbins mentioned this morning was this is the 30th anniversary of a Cisco event with customers and partners. He also mentioned 30 years ago, Seinfeld started, so I'm going to do a Jerry Seinfeld on you and go, digital transformation. What's the deal with that? So, you know, I think that one of the things that's really exciting and being part of Ansible and actually coming from the network space, we've had the opportunity to really be out in front of this whole digital transformation. We've been doing it for a very long time, and it's really been all about adjuring, and that's really what, I think earmarks, really what Ansible's all about. Yeah, Peter, so another thing we've been on a journey a long time, that whole automation thing, we've been talking about that my entire career in the network, so bring this forward. You know, maybe, you know, not 30 years, but you know, what's going on in the last couple of years that's different about automation, you know, 2019, then we would have talked about, you know, when you first joined Ansible. Yeah, you know, I think that when I first joined, you know, everything was, we were just trying to get in fence, people, that this was something you should think about doing. You know, now you look around, you see what's going on here at Live and at DevNet, and it's become a whole world unto itself, and it's really starting to define its own space in networking, which is really exciting to see, because I've been part of this journey really since the get-go, and it's just, it's really exciting to watch this whole world start to come together, and people really take the interest in changing really the way that we approach operating infrastructure. And I'm glad, Ashley, you mentioned the DevNet zone that we're in here, so there's lots of workshops happening right next to us here. Developers really helping to drive that transformation toward software. Big piece of your world, I'm assuming. It is, it really is, you know, and I always love to tell the story of, you know, I've got a software development background, but I also have a network operations background, and watching these two worlds come together is so exciting, and being out at the forefront, really pushing the envelope of what we can do from an automation perspective is really been exciting. So, as Stu mentioned, we're in the DevNet zone. This DevNet community is massive. It is. John Farrier and I had the opportunity to cover DevNet Create back in Mountain View about six or eight weeks ago, and I think the number that Sizioui mentioned is 585,000 members strong. Looking at Red Hat and the spirit of this open source community, talk to us about sort of the alignment of these communities, and how this is helping to drive not just technology forward, but be able to get that feedback from customers in any industry to drive these emerging technologies into mainstream. Well, and I think you touched on the key there. It really is all about the customer and the customer's experience. You know, the wonderful thing about open source community is the fact that we can all come together, vendor, supplier, customer, you know, consulting team, whoever you are, we all can come together, and it really does become, right, we're all better together, and we're all pushing forward and trying to really change the way that we approach how we build, design, and operate network infrastructure. Peter, Peter, I wonder if you've got a customer example. I know sometimes you need to anonymize these things. What kind of things are customers when they're going through this, the outcomes and results that change how their business works? You know, so one of the things that, and I've got one particular customer in mind, I can't say who they are, but one particular customer that we worked a lot of time with and what they were able to do is they were actually able, we gave them back the gift of time. That's what we talk about with automation. And what we mean by that is they were able to take a job that used to take them literally weeks to get done, that we could now automate and get it done once a night, twice, you know, do it in a single night as opposed to them taking, you know, ways to get that job done, and that frees them up to do the more high value work that network engineers really want to do and not saddle them with kind of the more mundane stuff. Yeah, so just to follow up on that because, you know, traditionally that's been one of the pieces, right? Is how do I, you know, make my employees more efficient? How do I give them more environment? Something that they talked about in the keynote this morning is some of the scale and some of the, you know, dealing with edge applications and all these environments is, even if I had the resource, I probably couldn't keep up with the pace of change that they're doing. So when you start throwing in things like AI and ML on top of those, are those starting to find their way and intersect with what you're doing? Absolutely, they really are. And it's areas that we're starting to look into as well. You know, Ansible's been doing this for a long time, but we're starting to see how do we bring some of these other separate pieces and bring them together underneath this automation umbrella? And really again, we want to drive out that everyday task out of the operations hand so they can focus on the high value things of evaluating technology and moving things forward for their organizations. You say you were able to give that particular customer back the gift of time and I thought, everybody breathing on the planet today wants back the gift of time. But I'd love to follow that story down the road because the gift of time has so much potential, positive impact all the way up to the C-suite to, you know, being able to move resources around to identify new revenue streams, new business models, new products, new services expanded into new markets. So that gift of time is transformative. Absolutely, without a doubt it is. And you know, what we're seeing and what we're getting feedback from our customers on is that because of that gift of time, they're able to now focus on pushing their businesses forward, right? And they're starting to solve challenges that have always been on that traditional ever-growing task list, right? That never, you never get to. And they're really starting to be able to focus on those tasks such that they can start to become more innovative, they become more agile and they focus on their business, not on the act of managing technology. All right, so Peter, another big theme of the show here is multi-cloud, something we heard a lot at Red Hat Summit also. It's this skill set that's one of the biggest challenges for customers working behind between those various environments. How's Ansible helping customers bridge some of those worlds today? Well, so, you know, obviously Ansible is not just a network tool, right? We automate anything and everything. And we like to talk about Ansible as the language of automation. And really what it does for organizations, whether you're looking at infrastructure, whether you're looking at hybrid cloud, what we do is we bring a language to the operations team where you can get these to separate teams talking in a dialect that they can understand each other. And that's really what Ansible starts to bring to those organizations. That internal collaboration. Absolutely. Maybe bridging business folks and IT folks who wouldn't normally necessarily be driving towards the same types of solutions. Correct, correct. And it really kind of starts in, this is actually how we see Ansible kind of unfold in most organizations, right? It starts in these pockets and small teams will start to use Ansible. And then it just kind of grows and grows and grows. And what we find is all of a sudden, you've got a cloud administrator who can now talk to a network engineer and they can talk through this language of automation instead of trying to figure out how to communicate. They actually become productive immediately. Okay, Peter, some of the big waves coming down the line that we're talking to Kina this morning. You know, 5G, Y56. Yes. You know, just incremental changes in your world or, you know, will some of these new architectures that they're talking about, you know, have some dramatic impacts? Well, oh, they're going to have, they'll have huge impact. You know, I think, you know, one of the things that's very interesting when you look at some of these technologies are coming down the ways now is everything is getting faster. I mean, that's nothing new. We've been, you know, anyone who's been in IT for any period of time knows. It's always faster, faster, faster. But what it's doing is it's really motivating us to look at Ansible and rethink how we do certain things so that we can keep up with that demand and allow organizations to, you know, meet the demands of their customers in accelerating their time to market. Maybe dig into that a little bit more in terms of the customer feedback. How are you guys, how is Ansible being able to work with your customers across any industry, get their feedback to really accelerate what you guys are able to then deliver back to the market? What's that feedback loop? Well, I think, you know, when you think about automation, automation is certainly it's a technology, but it's also very much about how organizations work, right? I like to talk about automation is really more a state of mind, not necessarily a state of action. And so therefore, you know, we spend a lot of time with our customers to understand how do they run their business and how can automation become a way that they think about running their organization and really help them, you know, move forward. So we spend a lot of time understanding our customer's business before we ever get into the bits and bytes of what automation really is. Yeah, you mentioned some of those organizational pieces like the cloud guy and the network guy. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing customers these days? And you know, how are they helping to, you know, mature the organization to this new modern, multi-cloud, developer-centric, you know, software-defined, you know, buzzword of the day? I think that, you know, the biggest challenge that we see every single day with our customers is, you know, just where do you get started? How do you get started with? There's so much of it out there now. It's, they're looking at, and how do you get started with this and how do you let this thing take on a life of its own? And so we spend a lot of time just getting them, you know, one, two, three steps down the road, get going in the open source and then let it expand from there. And we bring a whole suite of capabilities then to the customer, whether it's through Red Hat Consulting, whether it's through working through our open source communities to really help them on that journey. When you're in customer meetings, where is this conversation now with respect to automation? As we talked about giving the gift back of time, that would go all the way up to the C-suite. There's so much potential there. Are you still having the conversation with more of the technical folks or where are the lines of business or maybe even the executive suite in terms of being a part of the decision and understanding the massive impact that automation will deliver? Yeah, we're just starting to see that transition now. You know, we just came off of Red Hat Summit and we spent a lot of time talking with senior directors, C-suite individuals about kind of that transition and how automation is, as I mentioned before, it's no longer just a technical tool in the tool bag, it really is becoming a business tool and how you can leverage it to really drive the business. So those conversations are starting now. We're just starting to see that. And it's really exciting. It's really an exciting time to be part of this. All right, Peter, tell us a little bit about what Red Hat's got going out of the show. I happen to stop down the show floor. I saw the command line video game which I've seen at Red Hat Summit. It seems that's making the go-around there. I know your team's having a lot of fun seeing who can get the high score. What else at the show should people be looking at for Red Hat? Well, so in addition to Ansible, of course we also spent a lot of time talking about OpenShift, which is the other big Red Hat flagship product and really what we're doing in terms of being able to deliver in the multi-hybrid cloud infrastructure and be able to run workloads in any cloud infrastructure no matter where that may be. And then of course it always comes back to the operating system, right? Red Hat and Linux, they go hand in hand. We are always going to be about the operating system and everything kind of bubbles up from there. So here we are halfway through calendar year 2019, which is scary. What are some of the things that you're looking forward to as the rest of the year progresses? Some exciting things going on with Red Hat and Big Blue, for example. Well, there is certainly that, although you could probably tell me more about how that's going than I get to know even anymore. But I think really what's exciting about the second half of this year, and you're going to hear more about it actually here at DevNet, this is a good time for me to mention this, is that we're doing a lot with Cisco right now. One of the things that of course, Cisco's making a huge investment in DevNet and Red Hat is really becoming a very key partner with Cisco in that. So you're going to see a lot of open source community work around Red Hat and Cisco collaborating together to enhance what Ansible is doing and try and bring even more traditional and non-traditional people into these communities. More collaboration. I presume over some of their cognitive collaboration tools like WebEx. Absolutely, absolutely. That does work on Linux because I've been using BlueJeans most of the time when I talk to Linux people. It does, I pushed them really hard because at first I had troubles with it, but yes, now it works fantastic on Linux. Couldn't be happier. You heard it here. Peter, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. We appreciate your time. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. All right, it was fun. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Thanks for watching.