 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well good morning and welcome to day two of our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. We're in Boston, beautiful Boston mass again. Second day of just gorgeous sunshine as I'm looking outside but we're inside the Boston Convention and Exposition Center, BCEC. Stu Miniman, John Walls here on theCUBE. Stu, good morning to you. Good morning, John. Yeah, lovely spring day here in Boston. Crowd's all excited, lots of things to geek out on. Well, let's go back to last night, first, second, if you don't mind, because we just got done with Keynotes this morning. We'll touch on that in a second. Last night, though, what an array of the CEO keynote you might as well call it. We have IBM, we have Microsoft, we have Red Hat, we've worked, you know, the boss of each. And first, let's just jump in first with IBM, Ginny Rometti on the stage last night. And settling, maybe a little few concerns with some of her comments. I don't have a death wish, independent, all that. So she said all the good things. Look, first of all, love the tone. We hear what you're saying and we're kind of laughing with you when they joked and said, IBM's been working for a long time on Linux. You know, we spent a billion dollars, that was a big dollar and Jim White, who's like, $34 billion is a really big number too and everybody laughs. The commentary notes and joking is, look, we want this to succeed. We're spending $34 billion on Red Hat, we don't have a death wish for it. We're not trying to kill it. And what she said specifically, and they've said it before, but it bears repeating, more often, is Red Hat will stay separate. They're not going to blue wash the company, which is the term for when they normally integrate and take over, they're going to stay separate. The brand is going to stay separate. That's why they didn't stop something like the new rebranding, new hat, same sole, same hat, but new logo, same sole. All of those things are in place. When I talk to lots of people in Red Hat, they expect that day after this closes, they'll be doing the same job. They understand that things like IBM scale should be able to enable them and there will be more collaboration there, but they're under the umbrella, but are managed separately. And that's something we want. The other thing that Ginny pointed out, which I thought was important that she say it, and it's something that we'll all be watching, is the culture that they have built is super, super important. She said Red Hat's built a wonderful company, and maybe more importantly, culture. And Jim was like, oh, in our ecosystem, you don't forget our ecosystem. She's like, of course. But that culture should actually slowly infuse into IBM, not the reverse. We don't want IBM, look, great culture, great innovation, strong history, but IBM is not looking to take IBM's culture and put it on Red Hat. They want to learn from the younger company and moving and growing fast. So it can help accelerate work together and absolutely important. And as Jim said on stage, pretty impressive to hear the Red Hat show. You start out with the CEO of IBM. You end with the CEO of Microsoft. Those are two pretty impressive tech companies with their CEOs coming to talk to this community. Tell me about on the culture standpoint though, because you do have some very definite differences, right? And just in terms of history, IBM, been around forever, Red Hat, new kid on the block, relatively speaking. How hard do you think it really will be? I mean, you've been around this space for a long time, that there's just, I think, an institutional resistance that is almost inevitable. Yeah, it's going to take a lot of open-mindedness and bending on the IBM side. Look, yes and no, because, look, Red Hat has facilities. If they're not living in the same place, if they're, you know, the tower down in Raleigh, where Red Hat is, if that stays, Red Hat people, and they stay separate, sure they might have some calls where they collaborate, but it's, you know, Conway's Law I like to go to, is the way software is designed matches the organizational structure. If the organizational structure gets mixed between them, expect that IBM culture, just because the size of it, you know, will likely overpower that. And it's really easy for it to leak that way. Going the other way, you know, Red Hat's got, you know, about 12, 13,000 employees. You know, IBM's got well over 100,000 employees. So can Red Hat infiltrate it in pieces and places and start doing it, sure, but it would be very easy for IBM just to total have a blue wave wash over and make Red Hat lose, you know, what makes them so special. And they are special in this industry, but one of the things I actually really loved in the keynote we'll talk to is some of that, they call their innovation labs, what they help teach some of that culture to some pretty impressive companies and help them along that technical journey to, you know, not just do the technology, but the cultural changes so that, you know, they can live in that multi-cloud world. They can live, you know, work with open source even more. I think we got the impression, at least I did, you know, listening to Jenny too, that there's a recognition there that we, being IBM, you know, we need that. You know, we have a, we're at a somewhat of a competitive disadvantage right now. This gets us in the game on a whole new level. So I would imagine that message is being communicated throughout the ranks at IBM. You know, there's a reason why we're spending this kind of money and making this kind of a commitment because their ways worked. And it's in a space that we have to be more present. Yeah, look, I'm excited. Our first two guests of the day, we've got Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, and then we've got Arvin Krishna, who is, you know, the SVP of cloud and heavily involved in that decision to move IBM to do the acquisition and talking about that hybrid and multi-cloud world. We will dig in there because that, you know, is the product space. It's the area where Red Hat and IBM intersect the most because, you know, I don't expect that IBM is going to mess up, you know, RHEL, you know, from a core Linux standpoint, they've been partnered for decades on this. It's not competitive with IBM does. They, you know, IBM does not have a huge team doing it, but some of the other spaces, some of the tooling, some of the, you know, orchestration, and that multi-cloud world is an area that IBM has a lot of bodies and a lot of resources and we'll see. But, you know, an area they want to have help is, you know, IBM absolutely needs to partner in the multi-cloud world with more of the cloud environment, so maybe we talk a little bit about Microsoft. Yeah, let's go Microsoft here. You know, again, Kavanaiz Kumbaya moment last night where there's hands shaking, back slapping. Five years ago, they both readily admitted it. We're talking about, you know, Satya Nadella and Jim Whitehurst last night. Wouldn't have been like that. We weren't on the best of terms not too long ago and to think that we'd be sharing a stage and not only talking about working together, but being partners and truly partners. Many people would have imagined that to be just totally unfathomable, but it happened. We saw it last night. Yeah, so, and there was a lot more to, not just Satya being here, but the relationship that I've been learning more about walking the show floor, talking to some of the people, reading some of the articles online there. So, you know, big announcement they talked about is OpenShift on Azure and that, you know, fully managed, you know, common operating platform across the clouds, manage it yourself, consume it as a service, you know, deep integration there between Azure and OpenShift. So, as I mentioned yesterday on our Open, Red Hat's working with all the clouds, you know, talk to them at Google. At this show two years ago, they announced the AWS piece, but more than that even is, you know, some of the applications, you know, where is Microsoft doing great? They have business productivity applications. So, SQL on RHEL is something that, you know, fully supported and it's something that, you know, Red Hat's been seeing a lot of growth there and it's something that, you know, you think Microsoft, usually you think Windows and today in the technology world, you know, Satya's goal is when you think Microsoft, he wants you thinking, you know, Azure and AI and not that they don't have a strong Windows business or it's not going, you know, not going away. If you see things like in the demo this morning, they're like, oh hey, you want to, you know, manage all your Linux environments and login. Oh, they pulled up a Windows desktop. I mean, you know, I think it's interesting to see Linux. It's like, oh my gosh, that's blasphemy. How dare you, you know, pull up, you know, a Windows GUI and you see like Minecraft and all these other stuff there. It's like, that's not what a Linux administrator is used to using. But I can go to those environments so that blending of worlds is what we see and yeah, you know, Microsoft and Red Hat, living together in a lot of these customer environments is impressive and I heard Satya spending a bunch of time with customers here, didn't just fly in, do the keynote and then, you know, out on the jet off to his next environment, you know, working with the customers, strong commitment to the partnership and as Satya said, inter-operate and commit to open source, which if you haven't been watching the last five years has been a big push of Microsoft and is not the Microsoft that we grew up of, you know, in the 90s and like with proprietary software, proprietary operating systems committing to all of these environments. Yeah, I mean, so let's follow up a little bit on the commitment angle or, you know, that discussion because I think you raised an interesting point that this was just not a fly-by. It wasn't just a drop-in kind of thing. This was a, apparently from what your sources have been telling you, a very much more committed direction for the company from Microsoft we're talking about here, that's a strong statement that this is not just for show that our commitment is going to be the long-term success. Yeah, yeah, you know, we go to a lot of shows and when I've been at a lot of the open source shows especially really in the container in Kubernetes space so we've got theCUBE two weeks from now in Barcelona for the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Microsoft and Red Hat are both really big players in that environment and it's not, you know, shooting arrows and throwing stones. It's everybody's committing to the growth of these environments and the reality for customers is going to be multi-cloud. You know, Paul Cormier this morning said, you know, hybrid is the direction of like, well, no, no, it is where they are today. I think what he means to say is if you look in the future, it's not going away. It's not, a few years ago it was the public cloud was the enemy to some and it's taking over and beware. It's, well, no, the reality is is customers using a ton of SaaS, Microsoft to their credit pushed a ton of customers into that environment. The move to Office 365 wasn't a, oh hey, it'd be nice if you do it. It's like you were being pushed by, you know, into this environment and if Microsoft is pushing you that way and, you know, I was used to, you know, getting my disks and downloading things and doing that, well, this is the new world. It's, you know, SaaS first, public cloud, absolutely an environment we have, you know, Azure's, you know, strong growth, you know, really strong growth, you know, for many years and the data center. So you're going to have all of these environments and to manage them and make multi-cloud better than its parts, the partnerships need to be deeper than they were in the past. We can't have the old world of saying, oh yeah, you know, we signed some cooperative support agreement, but if something goes wrong, we're all going to be pointing fingers as to whose fault it is. It's customer doesn't care. They need to run their business. You know, it needs to be able to go. My data and my applications are the lifeblood of my business. So partnerships like Microsoft and Red Hat just make all the sense in the world today. You know, I saw some demos today of what I saw OpenShift for on the stage. You talked about the, what, the Microsoft and opening up in Windows and all. But pretty impressive in terms of upgrading capabilities and automation capabilities. Just in general, that's kind of the impression that I left with was, it's pretty cool. This is pretty good. You're allowing a lot of jobs to be done simultaneously without interference, without concerns. Whereas, you know, a year or two back, you couldn't have these dual operations going on because you're too worried about interfering or disrupting. Instead, you're giving great confidence to the application side and to the Dev side. So like Dev Ops is, you know, you're taking a lot of the worry out of the equation here. It's really interesting kind because, you know, there are many of the solutions that will just really abstract away or manage away anything that I need to worry about. I just want to consume it as a service. It's really simple. I might just have something that, you know, automatically does most of the stuff for me and I don't need to get underneath. But still, a lot of these demos, it's okay, here's my terminal and, you know, let me run through these environments and I want to have visibility. So we're in a little bit of a transition period here as, you know, where we are, you know, what my teams, what the skill sets they need to have, how much depth they need to be able to do because, you know, the sins of IT in the past was, you know, how much am I reinventing the wheel or doing undifferentiated heavy lifting where the vendors of the platforms could really make this easier so that what I need to do as the IT is respond to the needs of the business. I need to be agile and I need to be flexible and if I need to, you know, build this, you know, build the temple every time they need something, I'm not going to be able to be fast enough and so I need to be at cloud speed. I need to, you know, be able to, you know, respond when the business says I need something or I need to make a change. It is no longer acceptable to say, months or years, it's now usually measured, you know, days or weeks, if not, certain things are like, no, no, instantly. You need to, now, exactly. Ready for a big day? Yeah, absolutely. All right, Jim Whitehurst coming up in just a little bit, a moment or two, but we'll continue our coverage here live from Boston where at Red Hat Summit 2019 and you are watching theCUBE.