 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Well good afternoon, welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue live coverage from Boston where at Red Hat Summit 2019, I'm John Walls, along with Stu Miniman, it's been so good to have you here for all three days of our exclusive coverage of this exciting event, great event it's been. We're joined by Joe Fitzgerald, who is a VP and GM management business unit at Red Hat, Joe, good to see you sir. Good afternoon. Pleasure, thanks for having us for here at this, it's been a great show. I hope the same can be said from your side of the fence. I'd like to hear about that. We were talking earlier about announcements and whatever. Tell me about, what's your feel for the flavor, what's happened here and all that you've heard in terms of the keynote stage and some of the big news. It's really been a great buzz here. I mean, we had some really big announcements. My area of management and automation really complements the platform announcements that we made. As people are deploying stuff across really complex environments and multi-clouds, management automation like becomes really important for them to keep all that running and compliant and secure. So I'm pretty excited that my area was able to complement the platform offerings that we announced in a really big way. And when you look, now you look ahead to the road coming, right? Say this is New World, great opportunity, great challenge. But I would think you guys are pretty jazzed about being central to that, right? And becoming this kind of a new layer, a new part, a new piece of that equation. Yeah, Red Hat's really at a key point in terms of IT infrastructures and what people are doing. So you can definitely feel the excitement in our customers and our partners about what they're trying to build. And this is not the end. This is really sort of the beginning of where everybody's going. I mean, Relay, the OpenShift announcements we made, these are platforms that people are building the future on. So this story has really got a long way to go, right? And there's just a tremendous amount of excitement. We're really on the front edge of what people are building, how they're digitally transforming their business and building that stuff on our platforms. It's really exciting to see. All right, so Joe, when we look at some of the big themes we've been talking about here at the show, you mentioned some of the big announcements, but the world is more heterogeneous and more complex than it ever was in a multi-cloud environment. And therefore, if I look at management specifically, we know in the IT industry it's been something that for decades we've been trying to talk about, how do I simplify things? When I talk to my friends that are admins, the joke is, how do you spell single pane of glass? It's P-A-I-N, never what you would think it would be. So explain how in this ever-complex, multi-cloud environment, Red Hat's helping to progress the journey of management. Sure, so it's an area that's near and dear to me. So every time there are these great technological innovations at the platform or the application or at the process level, there's this secondary effect, which is the management changes, the physics of the environment's change, and then the management has to adapt to those new physics. So as people are taking advantage of all these great new public cloud services and private cloud services and hybrid clouds and multi-cloud, the management complexity of trying to manage something that's now distributed across all different platforms and all different kinds of management tools and interfaces in each one of those platforms, somebody has to sort that out or that will become a barrier to people trying to leverage that to advance their business. So Red Hat is sort of in an interesting place at the crossroads of things like analytics and automation to help bring some technology innovations to helping to manage these really complex environments. Yeah, so can you just put in a framework for us? Because as we say, there's so many pieces of the stack and it's so many distributed environments. There have been management tools that have become central to administrator roles. I think of if I'm a network person, there's a certain company that was rather dominant in the space, same thing when it came to server virtualization. And today, the multi-cloud world, every public cloud has their own dashboards. In the data center, there are lots of tools. So where does Red Hat fit in that overall picture and what might be different than people that know Red Hat from just a few years ago? Sure, so I think Red Hat's philosophy of open hybrid is really key even in management. Each platform sort of has a vested interest in sort of trying to lock you in and providing a set of tools that selfishly manage their stuff that nobody else's stuff. Red Hat is really in the business about enabling hybrid cloud and hybrid applications across these clouds and so what that means is that we have to provide management that enables them to cross those clouds and manage in a comprehensive, unified way. And a lot of management innovation is taking place in open, just like most other innovations. So some of the open innovation technologies like Ansible, for example, have like incredible growth in the community and the kinds of automation we can do across all of these clouds and across the layers of the stack totally in an open source solution is really amazing. So you talk about hybrid and you're talking about management and smart management in a way here. But that seems to me like that should be, that should just come with the territory, right? That we're going to make you smart and we're going to have you give you better tools to make sure that you have your efficiencies and your operations and everything's going just as it should, like that's like duh. But yet it's much more than that. I like to curious about your perspective on truly what defines smart management and how that comes into practice. Yeah, so smart management for us means an easy way for people to manage states of systems that are deployed across all these different kinds of clouds, private, public, physical, virtual environments. It gets very complicated and it sounds like it should be easy to make smart management but it's really hard to make something easy when you have the level of complexity that all these environments sort of extrude, right? So it's hard, right? And what you've seen over the decades is as the paradigms changed, management technologies changed along the way, right? And so we're in the middle of sort of a paradigm shift in terms of how people think about automation. The speed, scale and complexity of these environments is so high now that you certainly can't do it with people, you know, following things around. You know, the speed at which vulnerabilities need to be addressed or the way that things need to be deployed or scaled up or down or managed, it defies people running around so it all has to be automated. You're seeing a lot of other technologies like analytics and AI type technologies being applied to take all the data from these environments, figure out what's going on and then turn around and drive automation into those environments. So, Joe, when I look at the keynote, there was something that jumped out at me. You were talking a lot about the, go into cloud.redhat.com. They started out with a Windows interface which, you know, Satya Nadella is up on stage, but still being at the Linux conference here is at the core and, you know, underneath everything. You know, sure, it's going mobile and you want to make sure everybody can do it, but, you know, maybe talk a little about performance and the importance of, you know, working even from a Windows standpoint and as part of the overall SaaS delivery model for how management works today. Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things going on. First of all, you know, certainly in our consumer lives we're used to ease of use, you know, very simple interfaces, whether that's voice or mobile or whatever it is. We need things fast and we need things easy. Okay, that crosses over into the management realm as well. Okay, we need to make things frictionless. We need to really take the time and the cognitive load off people trying to manage these environments. Okay, so what you saw in our announcements across the board was this reduction of friction, this ease of use, the simplicity in the way you build, deploy, manage, and use these systems. Okay, which allows people to focus not on the task of building the infrastructure, which is very interesting, but actually advancing their business needs, you know, writing that next application or scaling it or, you know, making changes to, you know, compete at speeds that you really couldn't do before because of the manual impediments and all the process changes. And how are the pressures changing from the management side of the fence? Because of the volume of data and the number of transactions that are occurring, just that sheer scope to me puts a whole different kind of onus on the responsibility to make sure that these processes are occurring, you know, naturally and accurately and you got, on one hand, you're making some really big promises about how secure this environment's gonna be, how effective it's gonna be, and now you gotta back that up. So it seems like you're shining, or at least in your side of the fence, shining a little brighter light and putting a little more burden on the backs of your tools and of your folks. Well, so we're leveraging technology. So for, you know, the case of, you know, managing and securing these environments, using things like analytics, like, you know, one of the things we announced this week was the ability with our Red Hat Insights offering now, which is bundled with RHEL, to be able to analyze these environments and figure out whether they have vulnerability or performance or reliability issues ahead of time, predictively, and then be able to automatically address it and remediate it. That's really powerful. That saves somebody running a report to see which systems might have vulnerabilities and then trying to figure out what to do with that and then scheduling some jobs to go fix some stuff and meanwhile, you know, somebody's been, you know, going in their network or, you know, going into their systems for quite some time. So it's all about speed and leveraging technology to help do these things. All right, so, Joe, I'm glad you brought up analytics. Let's go back to that discussion of automation and Ansible. Help connect us to the dots, you know, I haven't heard like AI and ML, you know, maybe Red Hat's trying to make sure they don't AI wash things too much, but where does analytics fit into automation these days? So the future, I think, is basically, you know, we have a lot of data from these environments at all different levels of everything from the hardware, the software, the clouds, the apps, the usage patterns and things like that. We're a wash in data. Okay, so everybody is trying to bring analytics to things like their business. We're bringing it to things like the infrastructure and things like that. There's an explosion of analytics use across, you know, every industry vertical and across technology. I see analytics coming up with tremendous insights into what's going on into an environment or business. The next thing after that will be, I need to change something or fix something or scale up or down or optimize or do something. Right? That backs into automation. So I think that, you know, things like Ansible are unnatural to plug into analytics systems that come up with incredible insights or actions that need to be taken. What's a standard way that I can do that automation? Ansible would be my answer. Yeah, so, you know, when they read some of the, you know, other analysts in the industry looking at this space, they float out this term AI offset. Do you agree with that terminology? Is that fit into the framework that you were just talking about not just taking the data, but be able to have that automation take action? Yeah, so I think it's a direction, you know, I think, you know, in the news recently there's been automation gone wrong. You see it occasionally where, you know, automation, if it's not, you know, doesn't have the right sort of, you know, checks and balances can do bad things really fast just like it can do good things really fast. So I think that there's sort of a crawl walk run for a lot of these things where people say, okay, you have this result from analytics or AI. It's recommending an action. Let me confirm that. Now go ahead and take the action. Over time, people become more comfortable with these closed loop systems and then just say, okay, you know what you're doing there. Go ahead and automate that. They can move on to a higher level, you know, function. Yeah, just one follow up on that. You know, RPA is something we've been taking a look at. It's a hot space and getting a lot of development. Are there any connections between what Red Hat's doing in the ecosystem with some of the RPA solutions out there? So it's sort of adjacent to the RPA space. You know, this year I would say automation is at the top of most enterprises list. And you know, it's a spectrum of automating their traditional, sometimes legacy processes to squeeze cost out so they can move some of those people and some of that money to do their differentiating digital transforming, you know, applications that are going to put them ahead of their competitors. Right, so we're seeing automation to replace old tools that they have for perhaps, you know, a decade or more to the front edge where they're using our tools and you know, DevOps tool chains to deploy things, you know, multiple times a day. Right, so automation across the board, I think is a high priority for enterprises right now. Yeah, can you make this easier for me if you're providing all this great insight, right? And predictive analytics and, but I've got data coming in from all kinds of places and all of a sudden I've got to go find all these reports, right, I've got to, can you consolidate it all? Can you simplify my search, if you will, or make my job of monitoring any easier just because I have maybe a lot more data coming in that I'm used to. I might want it a little more simplified or at least laid out so it's a little clearer for me. Well, I think there's two things going on. On the data side, we're putting a lot more, software in place to evaluate data and to get insights out of the data. On the automation side, as we were talking about management tools over the years, there's been scripting languages and programming languages and automation was really almost a programming exercise. One of the things that we've done in the Ansible environment is we've sort of democratized automation and we've made it easy for non-programmers to be able to do automation. So now I don't have to get programmers which are expensive and in short supply these days to write automation, I can expand that to ops teams and QE teams and I can democratize automation. So I think the physics there are put more software analyzing data, driving insights whether that's machine learning or full AI or simple linear regression and some other techniques to get out of the data what's going on and then turn that into actionable automation. Well congratulations to the Red Hat team. Good week at the summit, I'm sure it went well for you as well and job well done and good luck down the road. I know you've got your hands full now but it's a good kind of full, right? It's an exciting time to be at Red Hat and thank you very much. You bet you, thank you. Back with more from Red Hat Summit 2019, you're watching theCUBE.