 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a preview for Red Hat's AnsibleFest 2020, second year that theCUBE's been at the event. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, Joe Fitzgerald, he's the Vice President and General Manager of the division that includes Ansible. Joe, thank you and welcome back to the program. Thanks for having back Stu, excited to be here. So, Joe, you know, boy, I think since last year, you know, the overarching trend of automation adoption has only increased, of course, with the conversation you and I have had back at Red Hat Summit as well as all the conversations we're having across the industry. It's been five years now since Red Hat bought Ansible. Remember, you know, big activities at Summit and throughout the industry. A lot has changed. The players that we talked about five years ago definitely have shifted. So what do you bring us in is to, you know, 2020, you know, the state of your Ansible business and let's give the audience a preview of what we're gonna see at the show. Sure, so it's been an exciting five years. I can't believe how fast it flew. You know, five years ago when Red Hat acquired this little company called Ansible, they were basically, you know, selling to IT admins in a particular space around config management. They frequently got lumped in with a couple other companies that were in that segment. Over the past five years, the stats are just amazing. Over the past four years, it's been in the top 10 open source projects in the world. Right, I think Kubernetes is number seven, Ansible is number nine and has been in the top 10 for the past five years. The number of contributors, the number of folks with Ansible in their skills, the titles, I mean, numbers are just amazing. And of course we've had, you know, analysts, validation and thousands of customers vote, you know, with their subscriptions to Ansible. So it's been an amazing five years of growth. Yeah, congratulations. Of course, the concern always is, you know, oh, when an acquisition happens, what'll happen to the culture? What'll happen to the community? Red Hat, you know, everyone knows open sources is in its DNA there and therefore the community is flourished. I definitely see Ansible at many of the cloud and cloud native type discussions. You mentioned Kubernetes, Joe, help connect the dots for us as to, you know, what should we be expecting to see when it comes to things like, you know, Kubernetes, cloud computing, edge computing and the like. So it's pretty interesting because, you know, OpenShift has been our flagship offering around Kubernetes at Red Hat, right? And Market Leader, just incredible validation, right? And so, you know, automation connected up to that environment becomes really, really important because even though people are modernizing their apps and running container-based apps, there's a lot of other things that those things need to be connected up to, traditional applications, other systems of record, your CNDBs or change management, things like that. So there's a lot of automation that has to happen around, you know, building, deploying, managing container-based apps in those environments. So sort of a teaser for what's coming up here is you're gonna see us pushing Ansible even further into areas like Kubernetes and OpenShift at Ansible Fest. Yeah, Joe, when I look at the entire landscape, one of the big challenges out there is there's so many tools out there. You know, developers have all the little pieces that they're dealing with. If you talk about Kubernetes, it's okay, which cluster am I doing? How do we wrap our arms around managing environments? I've talked to you about the ACM solution. Came out of IBM, now part of Red Hat. What I really love, the top learning I had from Ansible Fest last year is various people in the organization can get their view into really that pipeline of development from the product people through the developer. You know, we always hope that software can be a unifying tool inside an organization and it definitely felt like Ansible's doing that. So do we expect that when we talk about Kubernetes, that's the kind of expansion we have is that, you know, not just that I can do more as an individual person, but inside the organization, we can break through some of those silos. Yeah, so I think this placed Ansible strength. So Ansible, as I mentioned, five years ago was sort of IT admins focused on config. Over the years, we've expanded the number of domains dramatically into network storage, cloud security. We've also expanded the people who use Ansible Automation. So Ansible is extremely popular with developers. It's a favorite in tool chains, right, around automation and config and things like that. So bringing together sort of the automation that crosses all those domains and the different personas that use Ansible, right? Now bringing that and connecting that up to the Kubernetes environment, right, is extremely powerful in so many ways and covers a lot of the areas where the automation in those Kubernetes environments sort of ends and you have to have that connection to the other teams and to the other technologies that are outside of that to make the thing work. All right, so what specifically should we be expecting to see, you know, what'll be the same? What'll be the different of the virtual environment versus what everybody's come to expect for the in-person Ansible test? Well, first of all, the numbers are amazing, right? We've run a number of events over the course of the year, training webinars, all sorts of Ansible events, every one of them has exceeded our expectations by a lot. AnsibleFest is no different. We're currently over 15,000 people registered for AnsibleFest. It would not surprise me to see it go much higher than that. Our last in-person Ansible event was a couple of thousand people, the level of interest globally, right? Across personas for AnsibleFest is just amazing. So we think we're gonna see a tremendous amount of interest and in typical red hat fashion at Fest, we're going to bring out additional Ansible capabilities around Kubernetes environment, obviously, but talking about where Ansible's going with edge, right? And a number of areas that people are pushing out on Ansible automation, I believe Ansible's becoming sort of the de facto standard in automation, regardless of what domain, regardless of what persona, and I think AnsibleFest is gonna show again why it is. Awesome, well, Joe, bold statement, absolutely phenomenal to see the momentum there. I'll let you have the final word as to if they haven't already, why should people sign up and any other kind of cool customers or things that people should dive into once they have a chance to look at the agenda? Well, if somebody is familiar with Ansible, then they're gonna love the expansion of the domains and the capabilities necessary to really expand usage of Ansible. If you're new to Ansible, Ansible, if you look at the number of LinkedIn jobs that talk about Ansible, it's in tens of thousands, right? Indeed, top 10 skill that people are looking for in hiring. So automation is more important than ever given the sort of the world backdrop. So I would encourage people to really look at Ansible, to expand the professional skills and things like that and people that are already in the know that are using Ansible, wait to see how you can use it for Kubernetes Edge and really expand it beyond where you are today with it. All right, well, Joe Fitzgerald, thank you so much. And to our audience, go check out the website, really easy to find, register online. The Cube will have a full lineup. John Furrier is gonna be the lead host for the event in our second year of coverage. Joe, have a great event and as always thanks for having theCUBE. Thanks, I appreciate it. All right, check out thecube.net for all of the upcoming events as well as you can look at the back catalog. Of course, we've done seven years of Red Hat Summit as well as the Ansible Fest last year. So lots of good customer studies as well as deep dives on all the product. Thank you for joining, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks as always for watching.