 from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco, Moscone West for coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. My co-host this week is analyst John Shroy, who's the co-founder of Tech Reckoning, advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Craig Busell, Vice Senior Vice President, Application Platforms, Business and Portfolio for Red Hat. Great to see you. Thank you very much, John. So, big time executive, a company that's doing well and you guys are growing any more people every time. Being successful, again an open source, another generation's upon us. A standing on the shoulders of giants. You guys, this has been a business model for Red Hat for many, many years. REL, certainly successful. Container madness, now mainstream. Kubernetes, clear line of sight on what that's doing as an abstraction layer and standard, de facto standard around orchestration. Really good tailwind for you guys and the industry. Absolutely, absolutely. Congratulations and what's your take? I mean, obviously you got apps now, you got people going to be building apps, there's some working open stack, what's going on? Right, well there's a lot going on. I mean, we've been very consistent about our strategy and it's finally starting to pay off and come together and I think the market's starting to realize that. We have been talking about hybrid cloud before it was in Vogue and well over five years ago and so all those pieces come together. We've always talked about a story of there are multiple footprints, whether it's physical, traditional, virtual, private cloud and public cloud and then companies will want to and customers will want to do more than just the four footprints, they'll want to do multi-cloud as well. So, you know, we've been very strong on the infrastructure side, having Linux as the base and the operational consistency across those footprints in which to build on and then now containers and Kubernetes with OpenShift gives us that last leg together to give us that abstraction layer across these multiple footprints to allow hybrid to happen. I want to get your reaction on to this because we were talking on our intro package around the dynamic we're seeing in today's business landscape and technical landscape, open source, clearly the business model for software, right, check. Kubernetes provides some interoperability and cloud native growth for new applications, cloud aware, cloud native, whatever you want to call it. And then you've got legacy applications for the first time, don't have to get thrown away to go to the new world. You have the ability to containerize pre-existing applications while bringing in new functionality, new infrastructure, new software, methodologies, development, architectures, modernizing software while maintaining and preserving the life cycle of pre-existing applications. Great, absolutely. This is the dynamic that is really a wonderful thing because it takes the pressure off. Absolutely, and I think that's unique to Red Hat, which is we've always, not only the hybrid cloud story, the multi-cloud story, but the fact that containers allows you to advance, advance the movement to do digital transformation, start using microservices, et cetera, but you don't need to start over. You can take existing applications, you can containerize those applications, get them into a cloud environment, gain those efficiencies, operational efficiencies, and development efficiencies, and then start to also build new applications based on microservices, architectures, and bring both together. Some of the other vendors out there may only have a story about, well, you have to rewrite everything, right? Or it's only going to be public cloud and you're tied to those public cloud APIs. I think using containers as a methodology and then using orchestration with Kubernetes, you can have the best of both worlds, and we think that's important. I wanted to drill down to the stack a little bit more. I think this year, maybe even as opposed to last year, the Cube was at the OpenStack Summit and there was a little bit of confused talk about containers, what on what? OpenShift on OpenStack or vice versa. The message this year, very clear, OpenShift on OpenStack, here's the infrastructure, don't get confused. So we've got those two layers that you laid out, but also there's a lot of application services in the Red Hat stack that you all have built out. And I think if people were listening closely, right, there's a multi-year investment in there in things that originated with an application server like JBoss that now actually in 2018, architecturally, look very different. Now that's a set of services that developers can use. So maybe, I mean, can you talk a little bit about, I mean, that's an example also of not throwing everything out but evolving. Can you talk a little bit about the depth of the stack there and servicing all those various requirements? I mean, if you look at the stack, we're talking about infrastructure services. Some of those are in things like OpenStack. So, you know, whether it's compute, storage, networking, et cetera, we demonstrated some ability in through Kubernetes to provision and orchestrate VMs. And so you saw some of that in the demos that we showed today. But then once you laid down that foundational layer with containers and Kubernetes with OpenShift, then we start to build services on top of that. We have been building this portfolio of middleware services for some time. And so we can provide messaging as a service. We can provide integration and iPad services. We have something now called Roar, which is packaging together a runtime and frameworks to put together inside of OpenShift. We have process management and orchestration technologies, business process management. So all those services are something that developers need and you start adding those now as cloud services. And so one of the other things that we've also done beginning about two years ago, we began a journey for automating the application lifecycle of building application, the pipeline capability. We did an acquisition of a company called Code Envy, which is the founders of Eclipse Che, the cloud native IDE and workspace environment. And so now we've now begun shipping OpenShift.io to give you that end-to-end capability from beginning your project to writing the code to doing CICD and managing the full lifecycle. So it's all starting to come together for us. A big talk here at the show about Kubernetes being kind of the new Linux, right? The new platform that's going to enable a huge amount of innovation. But I love that OpenShift is more than Kubernetes A and also that as part of this, the role of Linux was a bunch of device drivers, right? And you're organizing on one machine. Now that we're in cloud, right? Kubernetes is about operations, like you just said, about the code lifecycle, about all this stuff. And all of a sudden, yes, it's an analogy, but it's much broader than that. It's much broader than that. One analogy, I mean, you made the analogy about Linux. I mean, Linux basically abstracted a number of hardware architectures and gave you a common operating environment in which to run on x86 or even run on a mainframe or run on power, now running on ARM. We have looked at and said, well, there's a similar analogy now taking place with containers in Kubernetes where you can create an orchestration layer and an abstraction layer across multiple infrastructures and then building app dev services on top of that. So that's what's coming together right now. So we think it's important also to build out the ecosystem. So we're providing application development services on top of this abstraction layer. We're building tooling and application lifecycle management. But we're also bringing in partners. So our announcements today, or yesterday with IBM and even Microsoft, they're containerizing SQL server. They're putting it into our container catalog. There will be a distribution of that. The IBM products and the IBM middleware products. And so we'd right now in our ecosystem development program, we have about 60 ISVs already certified already in a container catalog. We grade them in terms of their security. So you have some confidence. We have a pipeline of another 200 ISVs coming in. And then also our service brokers. So bringing in services. We made announcements last year with AWS to bring in some of their services like Lambda and other services into the service broker. So you see this hybrid world where you have a lot of different application development capabilities, both from us and from the ecosystem and the service broker technology to help you bridge the best of breed services from all these multiple clouds. Right, talk about the ecosystem evolution because you're creating an enabling technology capability and new growth is coming. You can see that already kind of on the radar. How is that going to change the ecosystem makeup for you guys? Obviously they've got the container catalog and ISVs. What's it going to look like? ISVs are going to be developer. I mean, how do you guys envision the ecosystem evolving over the next year? The ecosystem obviously is involved. Most of the traditional ISVs will begin to offer their own services. They might be hosting them on AWS, but they're going to provide cloud services. So they're going to be exposing APIs to use those services. So I see that the evolution isn't, there will be a lot of code that you still containerize and offer, but there will be many services that are hosted somewhere else, hosted in a cloud, but you want to bring those services to bear. I'm creating an application maybe on-prem with OpenShift, but I need to use a machine learning service from perhaps Google or from Watson and IBM. So how do I, and those are hosted services. So how do I use those services, even though my cloud native environment is inside the firewall? Runtime and integration are two critical pieces. You guys got to lay out across that. Right, absolutely, yes. And so this is a distributed computer. It sounds like an operating system, but it's spread all over the place. It's spread all over the place. Your thoughts on your current portfolio, how's it going to evolve? You talked about some of the services you're enabling within your own portfolio. For your customers out there now, RHEL, very stable operationally, everyone knows that. How is the portfolio within Red Hat going to continue to evolve? What's your vision there? Yeah, so we are beginning to do more of, integrating infrastructure services from Kubernetes. So what you saw, CNV Containerized Virtualization allows you to orchestrate VMs. We've done the same thing with storage and storage virtualization. You'll see more on the infrastructure side, probably things like networking are next. Some of the APIs within OpenStack, but then UpStack. We're looking at other capabilities. We do have a project going on right now with serverless. It's in tech preview. It was demoed yesterday, so you'll see a serverless offering from us. We have been experimenting with machine learning and AI, and we're using it inside of our own capabilities, like Insights, which is a hosted management tool, but providing machine learning capabilities and offering those inside natively with inside of OpenShift. These are all futures and part of the roadmap that we have going forward. So for application developers out there or potential partners of Red Hat, what's the mandate in your mind to make Kubernetes a first class citizen? So if I'm watching, I want to vector into this, skate through where the puck is going kind of mindset. What do I need to do? What does an enterprise and a business or developer or startup need to do to kind of connect into the growth? Is it a playbook? Do you see something evolving that can be a clear line of sight? Well, one of the things, from just a technical basis, if a partner has a software, well, get a containerized, figure out how that works in containers, how many, how do you structure that? If a partner has a service, then make that available through the service broker. We will work with those partners to look at business models that might be appropriating a cloud native environment that spans across cloud and help them market. So those are some of the things I think a partner or an ecosystem provider should think about. What's the feedback out of the show here? Obviously the hallway conversations, obviously a lot of OpenShift conversations at the centerpiece. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? What's going on for you at the show here? I think the breadth of what Red Hat has become, when we'd go to shows five, six years ago, we had started to build out the portfolio, but people would still come to the show and it's the Linux show, but it's no longer the Linux show. It's a much bigger, it's about computing, open source computing in the enterprise and cloud-based computing. And so the breadth of the portfolio, I think is a surprise for many people and how many things we do offer when you look at some of the customer testimonials and the demos. We're showing everything from infrastructure and private cloud infrastructure out to very sophisticated application development use cases. So I think that's a big difference than what you might have seen six years ago. You're broadening your portfolio from standalone Linux to include management, more applications. This is a bigger market. Oh, it's a much bigger market. I think we view our opportunity as becoming the computing platform, both at an infrastructure level and helping the developers for the next 50 years or so, hopefully. Right, and it's a shift in the marketplace too and a shift in skill set of the people who are here. That's another thing that to be able to pull those people into the future like that. Yeah, absolutely. The skill set used to be, again, a primary Linux show, a lot of Linux systems administrators and data center executives and data center managers. And now you have much more senior levels, many C-suite people coming here to understand how they transform their business, how open source can help, how this broad hybrid cloud platform can help, and then a large set of architects and developers. So the mix is really interesting now. It's not just infrastructure and data center guys, but it's the executives that make those decisions as well as the application development. You have more community members that are users inside the open source projects, making things happen. Oh, absolutely. It helps you guys out, it helps everyone else out. Oh, I was just approached by a large bank this week and on OpenShift.io, which is this tool chain, this pipeline capability now in OpenShift. They want to participate. They ask, how do we get involved in the projects and the upstream projects? We would like to build this out. So that's just one example, I think of, and we get asked all the time about, hey, can you teach us how to be an open company? How does open source work? How can we facilitate that in our culture to be a little bit more creative, collaborative, move faster? I mean, open source business model is definitely real. What other customer feedback can you share? Because we're hearing the same thing that customers say, okay, it's easier to recruit, it's easier to just make everything open just from an operational standpoint. What are some of your top customers that have been with Red Hat for a while? What are they saying to you when they say, wow, the benefits are, are what? Well, the benefits I think are that they are much faster to market. They can leverage skills and capabilities that may not be inherent in their own company beyond their walls. They could get, build ecosystems that have affinity to themselves, all because they're just reaching out, they're participating in open source communities and trying to create a culture of open source. And they get better products out of us, it was certainly great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Congratulations on all your success. Great to have you on. We're here at the Red Hat Summit 2018, it's theCUBE's live coverage. Stay with us for more. Day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be right back after this short break. I'm John Furrier with John Troyer. Stay with us.