 Hello, and welcome to theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. You've got a great conversation here, a preview of Red Hat Summit. What to expect on May 23rd, 24th, 25th in Boston. We got Chief Product Officer to preview, Ayesha Padani. Ayesha, great to see you. We got an event coming up next week in Boston. We do, in Boston. It's going to be fully live and in person. So really excited about that. Thanks, John, for having me on here. And it's really the combination of Red Hat Summit and Ansible Fest, which kind of a combination that's notable. I got to ask you, one, events are back. We just came back from KubeCon in EU, 10,000 people and 2,000 on the waiting list. That was booming, Open Source Summit in Vancouver that was booming there. A lot of topics, broader ranging topics from energy to classic cloud native to shift left security. So much is going on in the product of open source and cloud native. You're in the middle of it. Events are back. What are you expecting from an attendance standpoint? Is there any kind of feeling for size of the crowd? Who's signing in? What's some of the makeup? Give us some quick stats on what's happening on the front end. Yeah, look, we're excited just to be able to welcome back our customers, our partners, obviously media, analysts, the whole gamut. We should have a few thousand people that will see how many we end up with. Of course, we'll do live streaming of our keynotes for all the folks who can make it. But just being able to have a full Red Hat Summit like we used to in the past with sessions, with hands-on labs, doing some certification work, obviously all the informal activity and the hallway and in tracks, right? That I think is going to be where a lot of the value of Red Hat Summit is going to be. I have to ask you about the themes. Obviously, this year we're seeing two kind of tales of two markets. The startup growth side that's kind of slowed down a little bit. And then the other side just ramping up. You're seeing the convergence of two markets. People are retooling and refactoring. A lot of talk about right sizing, refactoring in the cloud, hybrid, and Edge. Edge is coming much more in a clean line of sight of what product usage there. The AI story is massive. And we have to talk about AI. I'm sure you got AI and the agenda. There was a little bit at Ansible Fest last year with Watson and IBM that had research presentation that we covered. So I'm expecting AI. Take us through what's the shape of the content? What's the focus? What should people expect? Sure. So John, you can't do a conference or an event anymore these days without talking about AI, right? So we'll definitely talk about it. I think it's really important to say, we're having Red Hat Summit and Ansible Fest together. So all the goodness that we talked about Ansible Fest last year will bring to bear here. Just in terms of themes, right? So AI is important. We'll talk about the power AI and how we can bring AI with open source to bear. So expect for us to share elements of, how we've been successful in getting enterprises adopt commercial open source with Linux or with Kubernetes and then apply that to the world of AI. So excited about that conversation. Excited with regard to advancing the Ansible story on national language processing and AI, how we can make that much better for users. Ansible leads us to an automation conversation. That's top of mind. In fact, talking about top of mind from a customer perspective, what we've heard a lot is managed costs become more efficient, become more productive at the same time as strive innovation. And then we'd like to make sure that we're balancing the two, right? So we'll talk about cloud, we'll talk about hybrid cloud, we'll talk about the benefits from that and we'll extend it out to the edge. At the same time, trying to keep in mind automation, security, gains in AI productivity, the developer experience and try to present solutions that customers can really take into the enterprise and gain value from. Of course, just to my note about Ansible wisdom was the product that we covered last year. I'm sure that'll be, because that was a very impressive demo we had in the queue. I'm sure that's going to have some AI. I also had some folks on Red Hat on theCUBE and Amsterdam for KubeCon, Kubernetes conference and CloudNativeCon. And I asked about OpenShift and the impact of AI. And there was no response, but there was a smile. I'm expecting OpenShift to get a little AI injection. What can people expect around any updates on OpenShift? Obviously it's been doing very extremely well, positioned perfectly with hybrid cloud and Edge. What can we hear about what can we expect around OpenShift? John, you know, I've talked about OpenShift over the years, right? And it's come a long way. It's now a billion dollar AR business, right? Thanks to support that we've got from our customers and partners globally. We've been seeing the rise of AI just in terms of the workloads that have found their way onto OpenShift, right? So whether this is a financial services customers, this is public sector globally, specific verticals, right? Like in manufacturing or retail. And so we've started to get exposed to kinds of workloads that are finding their way into OpenShift. Now you'll see us focus a lot more with regard to how we can have a platform that can really enable customers to take advantage of this. Both things that they get from third parties, so third-party ISVs, dual-frameworks, but also those that they develop. So a theme I heard you say was, you know, obviously rightsizing, cost control, doing those more with less kind of thing. Have you guys, are you guys thought about any content around scaling and simplicity that comes up a lot as people are looking at scaling? They're cloud native presence, moving off VMs to Kubernetes and containers. There's big emphasis on security. So we're in this kind of like, okay, we got to tool, retool and refactor, recost, but we're not going away. Cloud spend is moving on premise as well. So scaling and simplicity is a message and anything there. Yeah, we'll definitely talk about that. We'll talk about scaling, but we'll talk about, you know, scaling, how can you do that securely, right? You know, that'll lead to this whole dev sec ops, you know, type of conversation. We'll talk about, apart from the element of, you know, how can we essentially, you know, to your point about simplicity, how can we make sure that we're allowing customers, for example, use very priced Linux and use that at scale to be able to much more simply be able to manage those environments as well. So you'll see us talk a lot about the usability aspects that we want to make sure that, you know, we're bringing into customers. And then we'll couple that in with the developer experience. We'll, you know, talk about how we can make it easier for developers to actually access, you know, this huge set of tools and applications that are sort of sitting behind and make it much more easy, much more productive for them, especially in this sort of hybrid world, you know, this remote work distributed, you know, environment that we're still in, you know, how can we make sure that, you know, we'll continue focusing on productivity? Yes, I got to ask you about the edge, because, you know, we're bullish on the edge, all we do is we love talking about it. But at Mobile World Congress, we had theCUBE there this year, we'll be back next year. We really started putting a stake in the ground, like documenting where the IT transformation is hitting the edge, especially around industrial edge. We've interviewed folks at the open source summit last week in Vancouver around Kepler, which is an energy, you know, it's sustainability, seeing open source now going into areas that feel like mission driven philanthropy, but it's actually legit. Tech, this IT OT collision is a huge story. You guys are in it with Kepler, we've documented that. What's your view on the edge right now in terms of what Red Hat's gonna become bringing out? Can you share a little bit of concepts of what's happening at Red Hat Summit around the edge? Yeah, we're really excited about the edge, and I wanna make sure I tell you enough, but not, you know, give up everything. So folks, don't tune in next week, you're gonna have to tune in to get all the detail. We're excited with regard to, you know, I think you called it IT OT collision, I'll call it IT OT convergence. And we think there's a great opportunity from that perspective. What we've also done work on that we'll share more next week is, you know, an optimized Linux for the edge based on rail and optimized Kubernetes environment based on OpenShift for the edge. And then saying, how can we apply that to different use cases, right? So, you know, you talked about manufacturing, well, how can we make sure that we can help, you know, automation be taken right out to the edge to make, let's say, a factory floor more productive? How can we build on, for example, the work we announced last year for an in vehicle operating system, right? Which is running out of the edge with a partner like GM, General Motors and ensure that we're continuing to extend out the ecosystem around that, you know, we'll talk some more about that. So our definition of hybrid cloud has always gone all the way from bare metal. And by the way, bare metal could be x86, or it could be Nvidia GPUs, you know, to some, you know, public private cloud, but then also out to the edge. And then so our conversation will span that continuum next week. Dave Vellante and I have been discussing on our new podcast on episode 11. We're just getting going on new podcast. But last week we were discussing the whole, you know, Google announcements at IO and all the developer traction around AI. And we're going to continue this on our next, this Friday's podcast, but I want to get your thoughts on it because I'm seeing a pattern. There's a big debate around the wave of AI and all this big change. And I think it's this big revolution, like the PC revolution, the web evolution and then this AI revolution, I think it's going to be that big. And this discussion around the old way is either a disruptive enabler or it's a sustainable enabler. And there's nuances, right? A sustainable enabler is the big guys incumbents continue to capture rents on that value. Disruptive, the startup sees something new and it's usually not mainstream and they capture the rents when it goes mainstream. They capture that value. I think we're seeing a first time where you have both sustainable disruption and sustainable enablement, continuation of existing stuff and then disruptive for startup. So I have to ask you about how you see the partner network and entrepreneurs and open source contributors taking advantage of the new opportunities because I see both. You have extension of existing sustainable opportunities like Red Hat, going to the edge and then startups, entrepreneurs, starting, you know, seeing something early, making it better, faster, simpler or something new. It's kind of reminds of the web. It was slow dial up and it got better and better. You see, you have two waves of innovation coming. What's your thoughts? I mean, you're, you get the keys to the kings and you get the products behind you. You're going to have partners on stage. What's that look like to you? What's your vision around this new opportunity recognition, capture of net new and also existing growth opportunities? Yeah, look, a great question and a comment by you, John, with regard to what you just talked about. If we just, you know, harken back, right? 30 years ago, and when we first had the growth of Linux, I feel like at this point now, the rate of change for innovation is so much faster, right? We're cycling through much quicker than we in the past. So in the past, you would typically have an existing market, you know, for infrastructure, specifically infrastructure software, where you'd have an incumbent, you know, typically proprietary and that would be in place for a while, customers adopt that, right? Then there'd be frustration with the status quo and you had an open source equivalent, the modern disrupted, right? We saw that with operating systems, seen that with application servers, seen that, you know, pretty much you can, you know, walk through segment after segment, right? Where we've seen some versions that play out, but it's always been a few years, right? Until that happens. And now that rate of change is, you know, much faster to where at this point, you've got proprietary in play right now, getting interest, getting traction at the same time as the open source equivalent. Now, what will win out? How will win out? You know, it's hard to tell, but what is really amazing to see is that the market opportunity is so massive, the interest is so massive that I think this is a multiple of, you know, some of the other waves of interesting technology that, you know, we've seen so far to date, right? So I am really bullish on the ability one for open source to play a big role. You know, will there be a role for specific, you know, proprietary instances and technology there? Probably there always has been in the market, but then the interesting part becomes, you know, how we now take it out to the edge, how we go and apply it now to all these different use cases, all these different industries that in the past that you would have thought it's going to take them a decade like healthcare to get to this. And I think we'll see that happening much better. You know, I think this is, we're going to continue this conversation. Certainly when you come on theCUBE on Wednesday next week, but I think you're right. And then I think a lot of people think it's me that's the old model of you can't be disruptive enabler and sustainable. You got to kill the proprietary, but they're already gone. The proprietary is open source already won. So I think this is a whole nother ballgame. I think it's going to be a mix of both. And I think it's going to be a function of the cloud and the new data modeling who leverages it the best. Now, I think you can take incumbents out faster if you're a startup, if they don't move fast enough. So I think there'll still be opportunities to take territory or market if you're a startup. At the same time, it's going to be easier for the bigger companies to pivot or be agile to your point. So this might be a historic moment where they're both in play. And I think that's probably going to be the conversation. Final question for you partners. Who's going to be on stage? You have big players there. Who's going to be presenting? Can you give us a little taste there? Or is that too confidential? Well, we partner with all the hyperscalers, large cloud providers, right? Expect for them to be engaged next week with us. We've got ISP partners, global aside partners, partners in all the ecosystems that I was talking about, right? Whether it's out to the edge or it's with regard to the work we're doing in the security domain and so on. And then absolutely customers, right? Because look, all of this isn't possible without customers. So let's keep customers in the center of this and then talk about how we can build up an ecosystem to deliver those solutions to them. So expect to see a gamut next week. Final word for you to just share with the folks watching. The AI wave is here. How do you guys look at it? How should they customer and partners think about Red Hat in the new AI context? Yeah, so expect for us to play a similar role like we did in the past, right? Which is, you know, how can we allow for the greatest amount of innovation to be unlocked the world over for AI, right? So we don't want to constrain it. We don't want to say the single company or a specific sort of individuals that have all of this. You know, how can we open up that aperture, right? That's a push towards innovation, right? That's a push towards accessibility. But then we also want to make sure, you know, we do what Red Hat always does, the enterprise flavor of that. How can we make sure that it's customized to your domain? How can we ensure that we're helping on security, governance, compliance, all the stuff that it feels like, wow, that doesn't sound, you know, as interesting or as, you know, flashy, but it's all the hard work that the shop would carry water that someone's got to do and you know, we're happy to be the ones to help do it. And the infrastructure's getting smarter, programmable, cloud native booming. You got the AI wave is opening up unlimited opportunities to create new opportunities and extend existing value. And she has strengths for coming on and it's a cheap product, so you got to be pretty pumped right now. Open Source is one, you guys are the leader in Open Source. It continues to be the computer industry, proprietary software is pretty much either under the hood or completely hard topped, but Open Source has won the day and you guys are continuing to lead the effort. Thanks so much for coming on from this preview. Thanks for having me John and see you next week. All right, we'll see you next week. This is theCUBE in Palo Alto, California. We'll be in Boston May 23rd and 24th, for two days of theCUBE. It's three days of Red Hat Summit and Ansible Fest together in person. We'll be there. Stay tuned for more coverage on SiliconANGLE.com and theCUBE.net. Thanks for watching.