 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back, happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest but long-time watcher of course everything Red Hat Summit, but also seen what we're doing on theCUBE. Lee Day is the Vice President of Marketing Communications at Red Hat. Lee, for those that don't know, tell everybody a little bit about your role at Red Hat and your involvement here at Summit. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. My team puts on the Summit as a whole. We have many ancillary events like an Analyst Day, we have numerous press interviews and of course we're hosting these 5,500 people. All the creative elements you see are created by my team. We have an amazing in-house motion design team and design team, so really it's a huge team effort. It's a labor of love that we plan for the entire year to get ready for this awesome event. Yeah, so I want to step back for a second. It's been 12 years here at the show. Of course it's grown in size, it's grown in scope, but culturally and community-wise, what have you seen in the 12 years? Well, one thing that I'm really proud of is we've been able to maintain a sense of intimacy. It's really a tight-knit group of people. It's not a stale conference where people are coming in and don't really want to be here. There's a really good energy and we see a lot of alumni come back year after year and it's really a great family dynamic. Okay, and one of the other things you've been heavily involved in, the open-source stories, we were honored to have on the participants this year. We had the blogger, Liz, and the people from Bethel Israel Deaconist talk to us a little bit about the open-source stories and how that came about and what they are. Sure, so open-source stories are really a passion project for my team. We do a lot of talking about technology and we sell a lot of products, but we thought the open-source stories would be a wonderful way to humanize the technology and talk about how open-source can have real societal impact beyond just technology. So we are proud to have launched just our third open-source story and we're working on more as part of the series. Yeah, so a lot going on here, it's always a balance. Red Hat always finds a really good balance between community, we saw a wedding yesterday which was unprecedented, and then what Red Hat, sort of the commercial company's doing. How do you, as the event organizer, try and find that balance so that people can go find the parts of the show they like, you can interact with customers as a commercial entity? How do you do that as a team? It's a big balancing act. We obviously have a lot to showcase in terms of technology, we've got labs, we've got highly technical optimizing sessions, but we also want to show our soul. We want people to feel what it's like to be part of Red Hat and striking a balance is hard, but it's something the whole team puts a lot of care and effort into getting right. Yeah, just talk about the wedding a little bit. The wedding was crazy, we heard about it the night before, but how did this all come about? We had our first wedding, yes, it's unprecedented, but I don't know if any tech conference has had a wedding, but we had a great customer talk about how he was bringing his fiance to San Francisco to get married by the justice of the peace and his sales rep suggested that he choose the summit instead as his wedding venue. So we were obviously extremely thrilled to help out with that and organize what I think was a really sweet moment on our stage. All right, can you share how things at the summit and the open source stories helped get open source into the broader discussion in the marketplace? Sure, I think open source has become much more mainstream in years past. All the major companies around tech companies and others are adopting and adopting toward open source companies like IKEA, talk about open source methodologies. We have our open organization book, which is really about culture and design organization in an open way for agile computing. So we've really seen over the years that open source is transcending technology into organizations, into culture, into arts, into healthcare, it's everywhere. Yeah, how do people react to them? I mean, they're powerful stories, they're emotional stories, how do they react to them and do you even feel like you've got a need to include the technology or is it really just about advancing ideas and advancing, you know, big possibilities? I think they can live separately. It's about advancing ideas in the case of the open source stories. Although they do have a technical bent. So last year we talked about Penn Manor, which is a student led IT department based on open source in Pennsylvania and we also talked about Enable, which is an organization that's making prosthetic limbs for children. And those are technology based, but they are about participation and giving back. How do you continue, I mean, you've been at Red Hat for a very long time, you and I have known each other for a long time. How does Red Hat keep the culture of openness when there's competition, the world is moving so quickly? How do you continue to foster that and then how do you continue to communicate that like Jim told us this morning, it's always about open, it's open first. How do you find that balance? You just have to really stick with your roots and maintain that mission. Many people come to Red Hat because they really want to work for a mission-based company. And it's not always easy, it's not always easy to open source everything, it's not always easy to maintain this culture. Sometimes it's more complicated and things take a bit longer when you're more collaborative with people and more inclusive, but in the end, it's a better outcome for all. We get a chance to go to a lot of events. We got a great partnership with Red Hat, we really appreciate you having us out here. How do you think about the next year, because people want it to be bigger, they want it to be bigger. Obviously you're already planning out Boston, but as an event organizer, how do you keep coming up with big ideas? It's a challenge. This year, one of my favorite elements was the orchestra that did an original score for our opening animated video. And so as we think about the next year, the first thing we do is work with a team to come up with interesting design themes and work with our content people to come up with the narrative about what the event is about. And then from that, the whole event unfolds and gets planned. So we're thinking about it now, we've already been on site visits in Boston, we're looking forward to May next year. Yeah, great. Yeah, right there. Any kind of collaborations with the community that feed into both the events and the open source stories that you can share? Absolutely, we're all about communities. We like to showcase our communities, bring them together, give them a place to talk to everyone. We have Community Central here at the summit, just so many different communities, hundreds and they're all important to us and they're a part of our DNA. So having a place for them to talk, sessions and so forth is important. And then all the open source stories are really based on little communities. So Liz and the Liz Army is a little community about people that want to share information about brain cancer, same with Stephen Keating and the community he's developed to diagnose his brain tumor. So highlighting these communities, showing how the power participation is real is what we aim to do here. Yeah, you've got a son. We saw it, we were talking about going to Mars, we were talking to JPL. That was cool, wasn't it? Do you take the stories back and go, look, that's the things that mom helps make. Exactly, that makes it much more tangible. It's really hard for him to understand what I do. Yeah, what you do, sure. But to show actual videos and how we're running stock exchanges and how interesting things like the Mars rover are using open source technology and that open source is solving major issues makes it a little bit more useful. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's not just ones and zeros. That's right, that's right. Lee, could you give us a little bit of insight to kind of the cast of thousands putting this on? You know, the event like this has so many moving pieces. What happens behind the scenes, yeah? It's definitely an interesting thing. Our team is not as big as it should be to put on an event like this, so we use the word enrollment. We have tons of people all over the company that help us with this. Tons of ideas are brought in, they might not be from the marketing team, they could be from anywhere in the company. And that's another piece of Red Hat's culture that's very important for us to maintain. So the best ideas come from anywhere. We choose sessions, we choose like from over 600 submissions, we have a call for papers that are then chosen by very large committees. Nothing is done in a vacuum or in isolation. So it really is a whole year in planning with lots of people, customer-facing people, engineers, marketing people, sales, finances. It takes a village. Yeah, are there any kind of cool little pieces inside the show that somebody on the outside might not have seen that you'd want to share with the community? Many features. So we have a creative corner upstairs on the third floor. I think we do have really a creative vent to our brand and so we want people to participate in that. Another thing we have this year is Participation Square. So we have people asking our customers and attendees about their preferences on user experience, about redhat.com navigation and all that because we really do want our customers and our participants to help us make our products and our website and the whole Red Hat experience better. Yeah. What's the takeaway? You want people to sort of walk away this week from what Red Hat's doing, what their purpose is, what their mission is. What's that sort of tagline you want them to really take away from this week? I would like for people to have a takeaway that we are really a strategic partner, whether they're a customer or a technology vendor that we've got a lot to offer and that we really do want to work with people to advance their environments and innovate. All right, well, Lee, really appreciate you sharing this. Congratulations to you and your team for a successful event and thank you for the partnership and bringing theCUBE here once again. Thank you. All right, we'll be back here with lots more coverage of Red Hat Summit 2016. You're watching theCUBE.