 theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of HPE Discover 22 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, with a couple of guests from Red Hat. You may have seen some news yesterday, we're going to be talking about that. Please welcome Ryan King, the Senior Director of Hardware Partner Ecosystem. And Lori Fontaine joins us as well, the Senior Director of Global Commercial Partner Ecosystem. Welcome to the program guys, thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. So great to be back in person and I know Red Hat Summit was just last month or so. That's right. Ryan, talk about Hybrid Cloud, it's all the buzz. We've been talking a lot about it in the last hour and a half alone. What are some of the trends that Red Hat is seeing with respect to Hybrid Cloud? Well, I mean, Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat has been a trend for quite some time. In fact, we were very early in setting our course towards Hybrid Cloud with our products and platforms. And that's been a key part of our strategy in terms of the number of transformations that have been happening in the enterprise and with HPE. We're super excited about, we're hitting our stride with OpenShift. I've been working with OpenShift for the better part of my 10 years here at 12 years at Red Hat, 10 years with OpenShift. And we're very excited about seeing the pattern of going where customers want to build their cloud. It's very important that where the market is going. So we're seeing trends from the public cloud now go into Edge and Telco and 5G and really see them expanding their infrastructure footprint out to those use cases. And again, we see RHEL everywhere. So RHEL has continued to expand as well. And then Ansible Automation Platform has also been a great means of kind of bringing together community for that last mile of automating your entire infrastructure. Well, the functionality of Linux continues to improve. OpenShift is everywhere. I mean, I remember at the Red Hat summit, I mean, we coined this term super cloud, which is this layer that floats on-prem to cross clouds out to the Edge. We had Verizon on. They were talking about 5G developers and how they're developing, using a combination of OpenShift. So you guys have been really crushing it with OpenShift. I remember, gosh, I mean, we've been covering Red Hat summits for a long time now. Just to see that evolution is actually quite amazing. Yeah, it's actually really neat to see our CEOs align too. So the messaging that we've had around hybrid cloud from Red Hat, like you said, we were kind of the pioneers, honestly. We've been talking about hybrid cloud from the very beginning. We always knew that it wasn't going to be public cloud or private cloud. We had to have hybrid. And it's interesting to see that Antonio took that on and wanted to say, we're going to do everything as a service right a few years ago. And the whole theme was around hybrid cloud and giving customers that choice. So it's exciting for us to see all of that come together. And I actually worked for HP for like 17 and a half years. So it's really fun for me to be on this side now with Red Hat and see the messaging come together, the vision come together and just really being able to align and move forward. Tremendous amount of transformation in the last few years alone. Oh my gosh. But you talk about customers need choice, they want choice, but you also talked about we have to meet customers where they are. That seems the last few years to have accelerated. There is no more option for companies. You've got to meet the customers where they are. Exactly. Yeah, and it's all about choice, like you said. And everybody's got their own way to do everything as far as consumption goes. And we have to be available and spot on with it. And be able to move quickly with these trends that we're seeing. And so it's great to be aligned. And from a partnership standpoint, I mean, you mentioned HP at 17 years. I mean, it was a hard to follow company. You had PCs over here, you had services, the kind of the old EDS business now is such a focus on this mission of as a service. And obviously a key part of that is having optionality and bringing open source tooling into that. I mean, we heard about this in spades at Red Hat Summit, which is really interesting this year. It was a smaller VIP event in Boston. And I loved it, you know, because it was really manageable. We had all the execs on and customers and partners. It was awesome. What's new since Red Hat Summit? Well, I mean, I would say that obviously Green Lake and what we've announced this week is a big new thing for us. But really, like, we're just continuing on our pattern. We are now, if you look at the Q1 report from IBM, you'll see that the growth of the customer base for OpenShift that they reported just continues to go up and to the right. You'll see that now like Omdia is saying that we're like 47.8% of the containers market for the enterprise. You'll see that like we're now in 65% of the Fortune 500 with OpenShift, 90% with Red Hat in general. So we've established our footprint and when you establish your footprint and customers start taking you out to the edge, we're going into these 5G use cases where we've got incredible amount happening in the AI space. All these emerging areas of where people are building their cloud, like we're now going to that next level of saying how do they want to consume it? So what's really important to me about that is, so Omdia data is around 50% of the market is OpenShift. People may not realize a lot of people use, you know, do Kubernetes for free. You know, hey, we're doing Kubernetes, but they don't have that application development framework and all the recovery and all the tooling around it. And the reason why I think that's so important Lori is ecosystems want to monetize. So if people are paying for things, that becomes more interesting and it actually starts to attract people just naturally. Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of ecosystem, I mean, that's the beauty of what we're doing with GreenLake too. We're taking on a building block approach. So we're really, it's kind of ISV as a service, if you will. And, you know, personally, this was my baby for the past couple of years, trying to make sure that we took into consideration every partner use case, every customer use case. So we created an agreement that would make sense to be able to scale, but also to meet all the demands of our customers. And so what's really exciting about this is now we have a chance to take this building block approach, scale it out to all types of partner types, throughout the entire ecosystem and build offerings together. And that is really exciting for us. And that's where we see the real potential here with GreenLake and with Red Hat. What's actually available inside of GreenLake? So we are starting with OpenShift. So OpenShift will be available in Q3. That will fall in Q4 with REL. And then after that Ansible. So we're moving very quickly to bring our platforms into it. And it's really our strategic platforms, but it's all based on customer demand. We know we're seeing amazing transformation of customers moving to Kubernetes, as you said. OpenShift is Kubernetes with useful additions to it and an ecosystem around it, right? So that transformation is also happening at the bare metal layer. So we're seeing people move into Kubernetes bare metal, which is an amazing growth market for us. Explain those useful additions, if you would. So why shouldn't I just go out and get the free version of Kubernetes? Why should I engage Red Hat and OpenShift? What do I get? So you get all the day two management stuff. We have a whole set of additional stuff you can purchase around it, OpenShift Platform Plus. You can get our ACM, Advanced Cluster Management. So you want to manage multiple clusters, right? You get the ACS, the security side of it. You can also get ODF. So you get storage built into it as well. And we've done all these integrations. You can manage the whole thing as a cluster or as multiple clusters with the whole enterprise support and the long-term support that we provide for these things up to 10 years. So when you look at the early days, Lisa of Kubernetes, it was really the focus was on simplicity. You had other platforms that were actually doing more sophisticated cluster management and the committers in Kubernetes said, you know, we're not going to do that. We're going to keep it simple. And so that leaves some holes and gaps. And, you know, they're starting to fill those, but correct me if I'm wrong, but what Red Hat has done is said, okay, we're going to accelerate, you know, the closing of those gaps and stay ahead and actually offer incremental value. And that's why you're winning in the marketplace. We're an open company. So we're still doing everything upstream and open source as we do, sticking with, you know, the APIs and APIs to make this all work, both, you know, in terms of what the community is trying to drive, what we're trying to drive for our customers on their behalf, and then just where things are going from a technology basis. We make it a lot of investment. But you have to, you have to make it, Red Hat has to make a choice as to where it puts its commitments. You can't spread yourself too thin. So you got to pick your spots and you've proven that you're pretty adept at doing that. That just comes back to customer centricity, right? And just knowing where our customers need to take the platform. That's easy to say, but it's an art form and a little bit of science. Remember, these customers have experts that are deep in the space. So it's like, you know, those experts trust us with where they needed to go and they trust us to help shepherd that and deliver that as a platform to them. So it's not like anybody, tell us what you want, right? Like it's really about like knowing what's the best way to do it and working with the people that can help you understand how to apply that to their use case. And within the customer environment, who are you working with? Who is that key constituent or constituents that are guiding Red Hat in this direction? Well, it's certainly infrastructure folks. So it's your standard folks that are looking at the, how do we lay down our infrastructure? How do we manage it? How do we grow it? It goes out to the application developers. They're trying to deliver this in a cloud native way. And we have new personas, you know, coming in with the AI practitioners, right? So we announced before summit at NVIDIA's event, their new offering called NVIDIA AI Enterprise. And so that's them bringing in enterprise support for GPUs, for CUDA and for a software stack above that to start offering some more support there. So they're certifying OpenShift. We're both certifying the servers that run underneath it and then they're offering support for their stuff on top of it. And that's a whole new use case for us. And you know, I should also mention that even though this paper use with the GreenLake is new for us and we just had this big announcement. We have done GreenLake deals though. We've done numerous GreenLake deals with our annual subs, right? So even though this is new to us as far as monthly utilization and being able to do this cloud consumption, this isn't new to us as two companies coming together. We've been doing GreenLake deals for the past couple of years. It's just now we have this cloud consumption availability which is really going to make this thing launch. So what have been some of the customer benefits so far? You've been doing it for a couple of years. The announcement was yesterday, but there's obviously feet on the street going on. What are some of the big outcomes that you're seeing customers actually bring to reality? I think speed and agility, right? That's the biggest thing with our products. Being able to have everything predictable and being able to have it consumed one way instead of having this fragmented customer experience which is what we've seen in the past. So I think that's the biggest thing is speed agility and just a really good customer experience at this point. Go ahead, please. The customer experience is critical. That's one of the things that we know that in terms of patients wearing thin the last couple of years, people expect to have a really strong consumer experience regardless of what you're doing, regardless of what industry. And so attention and mind on that is a differentiator in my opinion. Absolutely, yeah. And we've got to constantly keep our eye on that. I mean, that's our North Star, if you will, right? So. I know you're saying you've done GreenLake deals in the past, but it feels different to me now in that it's actually coalescing some of the things that Fidel Maruso announced this morning. The platform on which, you know, ISV is a service, I think you called it. It now seems that, you know, like a couple of years ago, HP said, okay, this is the direction that we're going. They weren't there at that time. And they're still not there. There's a lot of work to be done, but now it's starting to form. You're seeing, you know, the pieces come together, the puzzle pieces, that sort of substrate being laid out. And now you're hoping that we see the steep part of the S-curve. And that's what customers, I think, are expecting. Right, and it's bringing that operating model to move to a monthly model so they can do pay as you go, right? And that pairs up nicely with the cloud native capabilities we're bringing to OpenShift and Hybrid Cloud in general. So it just shows, we're already getting demand from customers that's saying, like, this is part of our model. Like, we know a certain amount of infrastructure we want to own and we just want to own it outright, but there's a lot that they want to have flexibility on. And so being able to add that portion to it is just, you know, going to help us both. When you think about the critical aspects of the cloud operating model, it's obviously pay as you go. It's, you know, massive scale. It's ecosystem enablement. And also automation. I mean, that is a key. What's your point of view on that? You guys, with Ansible, you're, you know, you go back to a couple years ago and it was, you know, there was this, there were a lot of other tooling, but now, I mean, Ansible has really taken off. Yeah, it's just, you know, Cinderella story, right? It really is. Community driven thing where we just knew, we all know this, right? You have, when you get to the very last mile of doing infrastructure management, there's a variety of devices. There's divided a variety of vendors. And then you have like the variety of skills of the people that have to figure out how to automate all of this. And what Ansible did is it provided a common language across all of that. And so what we do with automation, our Ansible automation platform is we make it so now teams can manage all of this together and they can share their playbooks and they can host that privately for all their enterprise stuff that they need to do. So it's just, you know, it fits our DNA so well to have something so community driven, now with a really nice enterprise message wrapped around it. And it's playing out very well for where, you know, hybrid cloud, right? Cause there's some more additional variety you need to be able to manage, you know, across all of your different footprints because really it's like, it's not just about flexibility and scale up, scale down. It's where do you need it to run at what time, right? And that last leg Ansible plays a key role in that. And we actually, Ansible will be coming further down the patch. I know we're going to talk a little bit about what's available today versus what's available down the road. But yeah, we have that on the radar. So right out of the gate, we're working on OpenShift, obviously, bare metal. And we see that happening in Q3. And then behind that is RHEL in Q4 and then Ansible is going to be right behind that. So that's kind of the order that, and there's other pieces, right? So our whole portfolio is basically available to HP right now. It's just making sure that we can operationalize everything and have the best experience. All inside of GreenLake. All inside of GreenLake, yeah. Pretty neat. Laura, a question for you. You've been, you were with HP for a very long time. This is obviously the first discover in three years in person. Exactly. You know, three years ago, Antonium Near East down the stage and said, we are going to buy 2022 and here we are, deliver everything as a service as a partner and as a former HP-er. What are you seeing at this Discover 22? It's so interesting. I, it's such a sea change, if you will, right? And having come from HPE, I actually led the software as a service organization for a while on the software side of things. And we thought that was like state of the art and cutting edge. That was 10, 11, 12 years ago, right? So to actually see this come to life because we were all thinking, really everything is a service. How are you going to do that? Like your entire portfolio is going to be available. Like that is lofty, right? And having worked at HP, I thought, wow, I don't, you know, I know things take time. And, but actually just even being around the showcase here and watching everything come to life is amazing because I, you know, I was very positive about it, but at the same time it's like that, that was a big goal three years, right? And I'm seeing it happen. A big goal in two of those years during a pandemic. So talk about lofty. Oh my gosh. And quite a bit of accomplishments. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. Thank you. Talking about what Red Hat and HPE are doing, your partnership, PowerShip, is that a word? It is now. Your PowerShip, I like that. PowerShip, I like that. With GreenLake, we appreciate that. We'll look forward to having you guys back on. Thank you so much. All right. For our guests, I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave Vellante. We are at HPE Discoverer 22 Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. This is just day one of our coverage. Stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.