 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Being town, Boston, Massachusetts, Stu Miniman's home town, by the way, or at least town of residence. John Walls with Stu Miniman here on theCUBE, we're at Red Hat Summit, and Stu for you, good to see you here in a home game. Yeah, John, thanks so much. Very nice to have you. You know Boston, theCUBE loves Boston. The BCEC is actually where the first CUBE event was way back in 2010, and we wish there were more conferences here in Boston, gorgeous weather here in the spring, little chilly at night with the wind coming off the water, but really good here, it's the sixth year, we've had theCUBE here at Red Hat Summit, my fifth year at the show, great energy, and 34 billion reasons why people are spending a lot of time keeping a close eye on Red Hat. But, you know, let's jump right in. 34 billion dollar deal, IBM, Red Hat, got approved by DOJ here in the States, but there's still some hurdles that they have to get over in order for that to come to fruition. Maybe later this year, that's the expectation, but just your thoughts right now about that synergy, about that opportunity that we think is about to happen. Yeah, so right, let's get this piece out of the way because here at the conference, we're talking about Red Hat, the acquisition has not completed, so while the CEO of IBM, you know, Jenny will be up on stage tonight, along with Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, and Satya Nadella, you know, flying in from Seattle where he was at Microsoft Bill yesterday, so you know, at least two of those three are cubalums, so we'll get Jenny on one of these days. But, you know, this is a big acquisition, the largest software acquisition ever, and third largest acquisition in tech history. Now, we watched the first biggest tech acquisition in history, which was Dell buying EMC just a couple of years ago, and this is not the normal, okay, hey, we announced it, and you know, it closed quietly in a few months, so as you mentioned, DOJ approved it. There's a few more government agencies, Europe needs to go through, you never know what China might ask to come in here, but you know, really at the core, if you look at it, you know, IBM and Red Hat have worked together for decades. You know, we wrote a lot about this when the announcement happened. You know, IBM is no stranger to open source, IBM is no stranger to Linux, and the areas where Red Hat has been growing and expanded to, you see IBM there. So, Kubernetes, you know, super hot space, if you look, you know, Red Hat is there, their OpenShift platform, which is what Red Hat does for cloud native development, has over a thousand customers, and they're adding between 100 and 150 a quarter is what they talk about publicly. We're going to have some of those customers on this week. So, huge area, that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world absolutely is where it's at. We did four days of broadcasts from IBM Think, earlier this year in San Francisco, and, you know, once again, Jim Whitehurst and Ginny were on stage together there, talking about where they've been working together for a long time, and just, you know, some things will change, but from IBM's standpoint, they said, look, you know, the day after this closes, you know, Red Hat doesn't go away. Red Hat just announced new branding, and everybody's like, wow, why are they changing their branding? You know, when, you know, IBM's taking over, and the answer was, look, Red Hat's going to stay as a standalone entity. IBM says they're not going to have a single layoff, not even HR consolidation, at least at the beginning. We understand, you know, give them a year, stuff to work out some of these pieces, but there are areas they will work together. I look at it, John, it's like at the core, what is the biggest piece of IBM's business, is services. That army of services both from IBM, and all of their SI partners and everybody they work with can really supercharge and help scale some of the environments that Red Hat's doing. So, really interesting. I expect them to talk a little bit about it. Red Hat is way more transparent than your average company. They had an analyst event, like a week or two after it happened, and I was really surprised how much they would tell us, and that we could talk about publicly, as I said, just because I've seen so many acquisitions happening, including some, you know, mega ones in the past, and we know how little, usually, you talk about until it's done, and it's signed, and you know, the bankers and lawyers have been paid all their fees. Well, let me ask you, I mean, you raised an interesting point. There are some different approaches, obviously, between IBM and Red Hat, just in terms of their institutional legacies, in terms of their processes. Red Hat, you mentioned, very transparent organization, open source, right, so what we're all about. They rebrand, they come out, you know, they drop Shadowman, they get the hat. What's that cultural mix going to be like? Can they truly run independently? They're a big piece. And if you're IBM, can you let that run on its own? So, John, that is the question most of us have. So, you know, I've worked with Red Hat for coming up on 20 years now. You know, remember when Linux was just this mess of kernel.org and so much changes, and Red Hat came and gave, you know, adult supervision to help move that forward. The thing I wrote about is what Red Hat is really, really good at, if you look at the core of their do, is managing that chaos and change out of the industry. If you look how many changes happen to Linux, every day, week, month, and they package all that together and they test all that. Same thing in Kubernetes, same thing in so many different spaces where that open source world is just frenetic and changing. So, they're really geared for today's IT industry. You talk, what's the only constant in our industry, John, is it is change. IBM, on the other hand, is like, over 100 years old, and they're tried and true, you know, big blue. You know, IBM is this, you know, the big tanker, you know, it's not like they turn on a dime and, you know, rapid pace of change. You think of IBM, you think of innovation. You think of, you know, trust. You think of all the innovations that have come out over the century plus do there. And absolutely, there is a little bit of an impedance mismatch there, and we'll see. So, if IBM can truly let them do their own thing and not kind of merge certain groups and take over where the inertia of a larger group can slow things down, I hope it will be successful. But there definitely are concerns in. Time will tell, we will see. But, you know, on the Linux front, you know, they just announced this morning, RHEL 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, you know, just got announced, and definitely something we'll be spending a lot of time talking about this week. So, let's just jump into RHEL 8 a little bit, and again, we're going to hear a little bit later on. Several folks could be on board to talk about the availability now. What do you see from the outside, looking at that, what is it going to allow you or us to do that seven didn't, you know, where did they improve? Is it on the automation side? Is it being maybe more attentive to a hybrid environment or just what is it about RHEL 8 that makes it that special? Yeah, so, you know, first of all, you know, these things take a while. And the nice thing about being open source is we've had transparency. If you wanted to know what was going to be in RHEL 8, you just look in the kernel and it's all out there. They've been working on this since 2013. RHEL 7 came out back in June of 2014. So, this has been a number of years in the mix. You know, security, the new, like crypto policy is a big piece that's in there. The bullets that I got when I got the pre-briefing on it was, you know, faster and easier to deploy, faster onboarding for non-Linux users, and, you know, seamless, non-discructive migration from earlier versions of RHEL. So, that's one of the things they really want to focus on is that it needs to be predictable and I need to be able to move from one version to the other. If you look at the cloud world, you know, when you don't go ask a customer to say, hey, what version of Azure AWS are you running on? You're running on the latest and greatest, but if you look at traditional shrink wrap software, it was, well, what version are you running? Well, I'm running in minus two and why is that? Because I have to get it, I have to test it out, and then I, you know, find a time that I'm going to roll that out and work it into my environment. So, there is stability and understanding of the release cycle. My understanding is that they're going to do major releases every three years and minor releases every six months so that cadence a little bit more like the cloud and, as I said, getting from one version of RHEL to the next should be easier and more non-disruptive. A lot of people are going to want managed offerings where they don't really think about this. I have the latest version because that has not just the latest features, but the latest security settings, which of course is a major piece of my infrastructure today to make sure that if there was some vulnerability released, I can't wait, you know, six or nine months for me to bake that in there. The Linux community's always done a good job of getting fixes into it, but how fast can I roll that out into my environment as something people want to do? Yeah, I think I would assume that's a major factor and any consideration right now is on the security front because every day we're hearing about one more problem. And these aren't just small little issues. These are, could be multi-billion dollar problems. But in terms of making products available today, how much more important, how's that security shift if you could put a percentage on it? Used to be, you know, X and now it's X plus. I mean, what kind of considerations are being given there? What I'd say used to be that security got great lip service. I said it was usually top of mind, but often towards bottom of budget. When you talk to administrators and you say, oh, hey, where's your last security initiative? And they're like, ah, I've had that thing sitting on my desk for the last six months and I haven't had a chance to roll that out. I'll get to it. I will get to it. But once again, if I go to that cloud operating model, if you talk about the DevOps movement, is I need to bake security into the process. If I'm doing CICD, it's not, I do something and then think about security afterwards. Security needs to be built in from the ground level. As you know, I've heard people in the industry, security is everyone's responsibility and security must be baked in everywhere. So from the application all the way down to the chipset, we need to be thinking about security all along the line. It is a board level discussion. Any user you talk to, you don't say, hey, where's the security sitting your priorities? It's up there towards the top, if not the top, because that's the thing that can put us out of business or definitely ruin careers if it doesn't go right. There are probably a couple of platforms, if you will, or pillars, I think you like to call them, that you're looking forward to learning more about this week, I think, in terms of Red Hat's work. One of those being the hybrid cloud infrastructure and we'll get to the other two in a little bit, but just your thoughts about how they're addressing that with the products that they offer and the services they offer and where they're going in that direction. Yeah, so look, everything for Red Hat starts with RHEL. Everything is built on Linux and that's a good thing because Linux is everywhere. If last year was that Microsoft Ignite for the first time and when you hear them talk, you know, Microsoft talking about how Linux is the majority of the environment. More than 50% of the environments are running Linux. Go to AWS, same thing, all the cloud deployments. Linux is the preferred substrate underneath and RHEL doing very well to live in all those environments. So what we look at is, you know, some people say, is this a Linux show? It's like, well, at the core, Linux is the piece of it and RHEL 8, the latest and greatest instantiation, but everywhere you go, there's going to be Linux there. If I'm doing containerization, if I'm building on top of it with the new cloud-native models, it's there. And if you talk about how I get from my data center to a multi-cloud environment, it's building things like Kubernetes, which Reddit, of course, uses OpenShift and, you know, those ties to AWS and Azure and, you know, Google, they're all there. So we mentioned Satya Nadella's on stage tonight. At Microsoft Build yesterday, there was an announcement of this thing called KEDA, which is K-E-D-A, which has like Azure functions and ties in with OpenShift and spent a little time squinting it and trying to tease it apart. We've got some guests this week that'll hopefully give some clarity, but the answer is people today have multiple clouds and they have a lot of different ways they want to do things and Red Hat's going to make sure that they help bridge the gap and simplify those environments across the board. Two years ago when we were at the show, big announcement about how OpenShift integrates with AWS so that if I'm using AWS, but I want to have things in my environment and still leverage some of those services, that was something that Red Hat announced. I was, you know, quite impressed at the time. It was, you know, just last week being at the Dell show, it's VMware is the Dell strategy for how they get, you know, AWS, GCP and Azure and, you know, Red Hat does that themselves. They're a software company. They live in all these cloud worlds and therefore OpenShift will help you extend from your data center through all of those public cloud environments and, you know, yeah, so it's fascinating stuff. You've talked about Linux too. We're going to hear a little bit later on too about a fascinating global economic study that Red Hat commissioned with the IDC that talks about this $10 trillion impact of Linux around the globe. Like to dive into that a little bit later on. Yeah, well, it's interesting. You know, it's the line I used is you say, and you say, oh, well, how much impact has Linux had? You know, you know, Red Hat's now a $3 billion company. That's good, but I was like, okay, let's just take Google. You know, no slouch of a company. Google underneath, it's not Red Hat Linux, but Linux is the foundation. Don't really think that Google could become the global search and advertising powerhouse they were if it wasn't for Linux to be able to help them get in that environment. As we always talk with these technologies, you talk about Linux, you talk about Hadoop, you talk about, you know, Kubernetes. There are companies that will monetize it, but the real value is what business models and creation by all the enterprises and the service providers and the hyperscales that those technologies help enable. And that's where open source really shines is, you know, the order of magnitude, network effect that open source solutions have that it's, you say, okay, $3 billion, and you say, what, $10 trillion? Doesn't phase me, doesn't surprise me at all. Doesn't, no. You've got my attention. Look, I'm not trying to trivialize it, but you know, I've been watching Linux for 20 years and I've seen the ripples of that effect. And if you dig down underneath, you're often finding it inside. I mentioned pillars that you were talking about, cloud native development being another, but automation, let's just hit on that real quick before we head off. And just again, with how that is being, I guess highlighted or that's a central focus at, in rel 8 and what automation, how that's playing in, I guess the new efficiencies they're trying to squeeze out. Yeah, so what we always looked for at shows, probably the last year is, you know, how are they getting beyond the buzzwords of AI? When you talk about automation, an area that we've really enjoyed digging into is like robotic process automation. How do I take something that was manual and maybe it was efficient or not great? And how can I make it perfectly efficient? And you use software robots to do that. So where are other places where I know that the amount of change and the scale and the growth that we have that I couldn't just put somebody at a keyboard and have them typing or even a dashboard to be able to monitor and keep up with things. If I don't have the automation and intelligence in the system to manage things, I can't reach the scale and the growth that I need to. So where are real solutions that are helping customers get over a little bit of the fear of, oh my gosh, am I losing a job or will this work or will this keep my business running? And oh my gosh, this will actually enable me to be able to grow, work on that security issue if I need to, rather than some of the other pieces and help really allow IT agility to meet the requirements of what the business requires to help me move forward. So those are some of the things, you know, we kind of look across the shows. So, you know, yeah, how much do we get, you know, buzzword bingo at the show or how much do we hear, you know, real customers with real solutions digging in and having, you know, new technologies that a couple of years ago would have had us saying, wow, that's magic. Yep, well, what are you saying? Oh my gosh. And I don't, oh my gosh. All right, back with more. You're watching us here in theCUBE with the Red Hat Summit. We're in Boston, Massachusetts and we'll be back with more coverage right after this.