 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Seventh year, we've been covering the event, of course, one of the differentiatives this year is it is a virtual event. We're bringing Red Hat executives, customers, and partners from where they are around their globe to this digital event and really happy to bring back. One of our CUBE alumni is also one of the keynote speakers. He's got a new role, but lots of technology to share. Matt Hicks, the SVP of product and technologies with Red Hat. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. Normally we'd all get together, you and I are even geographically, relatively close to each other, but of course today, as we've said many times, we are together apart. So thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, so compared to some say at the company that owns Red Hat, IBM, you're a relatively short timer with Red Hat, you've only been there for 14 years, Matt, but we've talked to you many times, OpenShift, one of the big things we talk about with you over the last few years, you're one of the founding members of that team, but before we get into it, just you've got a new role, the product pieces we said, you're kind of stepping up, filling in for the shoes that Paul has, as Paul now steps up to the CEO role. So tell us a little bit about what that means for you and your organization. Yeah, sure. So you're right, I used to run an engineering for Red Hat and now I have the scope of engineering and the business and our support organization. So Paul's previous role and it's a great opportunity. I'm excited about it. I've been at Red Hat for 14 years. I was actually at IBM prior, so the combination has been pretty significant there, but it's just the neat opportunity. I love being able to focus on the entire portfolio, focus on how it's impacting customers, especially right now. This is a tricky time right now for a lot of customers. I think Red Hat has, we're doing our best to make sure we have that value for them, just to sort of get through the crisis and pinch for them. Yeah, absolutely, Matt. Usually when we're looking at a keynote, it's celebrating some new announcement, talking about the culmination of these things. And there's a real effort, of course, to set a nice balanced tone here. Of course, you've got lots of critical companies that rely on Red Hat technologies, on your partner solutions to make sure things work. So, bring us in a little side, basically the organization and how you're helping your customers in these challenging times. Yeah, I know this year we didn't make a big push in PR, hoop level, all the work. We're really proud of that work, but it just wasn't the right time to have that focus on product releases. That said, if you look at our customer base, they're pretty split right now. We have a large part of our customer base. They are folks on just weathering the storm right now. And a lot of that work is it's cost savings, it's efficiency. It's actually doubling down on their data centers, where they've got to go back to things that they own. And down that side, we've thrown a whole host of efforts at that from extending our support services. We've gone through extending our product lifestyles so customers don't get pinned and having to do an upgrade right now. We're working with Ansible and with RHEL just in how we can help customers save and get through it sort of in the way that they want. On the other side though, take some industries, whether they're developing a vaccine or shipping, one of those, they're exploding. Like they need to scale and push and we're making sure that we didn't hold back any technology. Because the toughest thing would be to say, well, let's take in an open shift. We have new serverless capabilities or pipelines. We didn't want to take any of those pieces away from a customer that might be needing to scale 500% right now. But it's a challenging time. We sort of have helping customers is on either end of a really, really wide spectrum. And the good news that we have, I think we have good solutions on both to help them through, but it is a unique experience for me and as long as I've been an industry, I haven't quite seen this much of a divide. Yeah, it's really, you know, Matt, I think back to, you know, I was working in the tech vendor community back when 9-11 happened and some of the rallying of the community, but this has a personal impact for everyone. It's, you know, 9-11, it was kind of everybody went home for a day and then rally the troops. You didn't make a big deal of it, but you made sure you helped those customers today. This has such a wide impact and as you said, you know, very, you know, unique time that we're living in here. One of the messages you talked about in your keynote is it was really emphasizing a message we've heard for Red Hat for a number of years, talking about how your solutions really go everywhere. And even more than ever, so some of the stories you hear about where technology is accelerating, of course, things like work from home, but also customers that are doing digital transformations or have been looking at cloud adoption, sometimes those things, they need to move through some of the last few steps even faster because they can't touch the gear or they can't access stuff or I need to get that automation going even faster so that we can leverage it. So help us walk through a little bit, you know, where your technology pieces are, you know, open shift and some of the other technologies that are so critically important for customers today. Yeah, you're touching a lot of areas. And I would say we probably saw this start and certainly been amplified in just a lot of importance with Helco. So telecom providers, as they push towards things like 5G, it's not the traditional, like you have one data center type play and that's what you control and whether you call this edge or anything else, it really, you have these multiple tiers of infrastructure and they run at massive scale. So they wanted one technology platform that could run as close to the user as possible and run in a bunch of different form factors and footprints also. And that's where we really started working with the telecom providers on OpenShift and taking some of the experience, you know, we certainly work a lot with them with OpenStack on core networks, but as things got closer to the edge that push to OpenShift is pretty prevalent. We are now seeing, and you mentioned it, where I think customers, a lot of customers are being just forced into the digital transformation journey right now. Really, like, well, everyone's home, like how do you serve your customers with this? And they're really that last mile of change is coming very quick to them. And I think we're seeing a lot of similarities with that technology base, like the same challenges that the telecom providers hit can be applied to other industries, whether it's manufacturing, others. And this, generally, we call it like, it's that edge-focused area. You don't have an infrastructure that runs in one place, you're having to aggregate a lot of it. We call this our hybrid cloud work and OpenShift is really Red Hat's hybrid cloud platform there. Yeah, you know, so often we talk about some of the hype that goes around certain words. I think about cloud native. We've been talking about cloud for so many years. Red Hat, of course, partners with all the various solutions out there. But right, when things need to get done, it's how does it help businesses? How does it help IT react to the business? And how do we make sure we stay in business? So, how was that conversation of cloud native changed? And where's Red Hat fitting in that discussion? Yeah, I think, yeah, not the best circumstance, but I think one of the things that's been really prevalent is when you see this pullback, in some cases, to data centers, that conversation about, did I build my apps to a standard that I've got to cut costs and I move them to a lower cost infrastructure for me, like right now in a week or two weeks? That's becoming pretty critical, where we've believed in that model for a long time of whether it's cloud native services, building them to a platform that gives you that flexibility, that has become a pain point for customers right now. And one of the nice things, we've seen this in some government services, where if they're built on OpenShift, even on-premise, they're on the other side of that, where they're having to scale these services massively. They're able to take the same app, same platform, go out to public cloud providers and actually help fulfill that scale. Customers, I think, that built to that pattern, if they're contracting for a bit or doubling down on their data center, they have the same thing. They can pull back from the public cloud if they need to. But that app portability has gone from being real secondary tertiary concern to being a critical aspect of cost savings for just a lot of enterprises right now and in a shockingly short period of time. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about engineering groups and how they're building product, most of the development teams I talked to were distributed before this event happened. And yes, there's some adjustments that need to happen. I think Red Hat has some almost unique capabilities compared to some others out there because not only do you have your development teams, but of course, everything that Red Hat's doing is open source. So Matt, I'd love to hear your viewpoint as you think about your product roadmap and what's going to happen in 2020. How do the communities, and there's been a number of course key acquisitions that Red Hat has done over the years. So talk a little bit about that dynamic and how much this affects what's happening and how this helps Red Hat both put together the products and the portfolio that it offers. Yeah, I think you're right. We are incredibly lucky just business model-wise and even as a starting point where on the engineering team, over half of our engineering team is remote to begin with. And then on top of that, we work with open source communities where we're still just the minority presence in most of those. And so you're working with team members that you've never met. So you could say the bulk of the work that we did was really distributed. So it wasn't just a huge system shock of everybody stay productive, stay from home. The second part of those great, our strategy overall really doesn't change for us because we're seeing a lot of pressure applied to it where customers, maybe a three year plan to get there is becoming their six month plan. But in terms of running infrastructure in these combinations, being able to run it in your data center, being able to scale out to public clouds and do that consistently, that hasn't changed for us. We are refining areas of making sure that we contribute and really double down on infrastructure like mission critical infrastructure like telcos right now. They're certainly going through the scale. They're going to push for things like 5G. We want to make sure we're doing everything we can for that but we were already working pretty closely with them. So not a huge strategy shift for us. It's how can we just really focus these on the value that customers need right now? We're excited about if you look in the efficiency areas and these combinations of what we're doing with Ansible, it's pretty critical to users. Like if you take a REL user that's running a data center, it's worth a gear and they need to remotely be able to manage it, control it, optimize it because they can't get people there. Great solutions around Ansible. So we're really pushing down that path. Then if you look at other areas like with OpenShift, some of the management work we've been doing or the scaling areas, if you go through serverless models or pipelines, like if you're in the shipping industry or you're in pharmaceuticals working on vaccines, they have massive scaling needs right now. And so they're pushing very hard on that sort of new technology. All right, well, Matt, there is one technology area that I'd love to get your view playing on. Talked a little bit about in the keynote, definitely. I know there's plenty of breakouts and we actually have a few interviews digging into, of course, you know, Kubernetes. The latest is going on with OpenShift and a big piece is the virtualization with OpenShift virtualization. As I mentioned at the beginning, you're one of the founding members of the OpenShift team. So as you look at bare metal, virtualization, containers versus VMs, public cloud on-premises, give us your viewpoint as to really where we are in 2020 and how some of that journey has changed over time and how Red Hat might have a slightly different view of how things should be built and where the future should go compared to others in the industry. Yeah, no, I'm really excited about this area because if you look at, you know, Red Hat's sort of view on this is that we can run Kubernetes sort of as the thing that directly runs on Linux and bare metal. And for us, that's OpenShift and RAL. And it's very powerful because if you look at what virtualization came from, it was machines got really strong. And so we needed to carve them up into smaller pieces to make them manageable. That's what Linux containers do is they take a machine, they carve them up into these units and let you use all of the power on the physical hardware. And we know this world from RAL for us. Like that's what Linux does, it lights up hardware. So I think the norm in the industry for the last few years was people would still carve up machines with virtualization, then they would run containers on top. And virtualization was sort of your main substrate. And there were some challenges with that. Like containers, it's harder for them to move across those boundaries. Like VMs are isolated for a reason. We actually think, and it was an upstream project called Kubevert. Again, we saw this in the telcos pretty early where they were putting OpenShift on bare metal, on gear itself. And they were driving to run virtualization inside of that. And then really you had the flexibility of containers carving up the hardware. And when you need to bring VMs in, we can run VMs inside of containers. And that it's the opposite of how most people think about it but it gives you the best of both worlds. Cause we look at Kubernetes, it is sort of that next generation infrastructure layer and you can fit VMs very nicely into that. That's what we're doing with container native virtualization. Gives you good cost benefits on that. And also if you're going from a virtualized world to a container world, you're optimizing towards that destination with OpenShift. And it's just, it is neat technology. Cause I think most customers, they still have a ton of VMs out there. So even if they're bought off on an OpenShift path, how do they bring VMs into that story? And so that as of now, like that's something we're enabling them to be able to do. So cool technology. I'm excited about that. And again, it has a great telco focus for us right now. But I think this is one where it'll have broad reach across enterprise users too, just that are already down this journey and need to accelerate it for cost savings. That's a great solution there. Yeah, definitely from what I've learned, it's pretty empowering to really help that application development team understand really those cloud native architectures, if you will. And one of the challenges of VMs was used to just kind of stick the application in there and not think about it anymore. And that does not meet where really companies are going. Sorry, Matt, got to ask you the last question since you own product and technologies. Talk about some of the, you know, the tough areas. Where is Red Hat really working with the community to help really improve things for the ecosystem and for customers as you look out through the rest of 2020? Yeah, I think looking out for the rest of 2020, it's sort of, it's picking focus areas because the most challenging thing, you know, the nice part, especially at Red Hat too, there is a ton of goodwill. Like what can we jump in, help, what can we do? And when we looked at it, a lot of our customers, they're doing awesome things. And they're sort of in the middle of the crisis. So a big part of our focus then, making sure we help them. One of my favorite stories, it's close to really like Red Hat's ethos is Metronics, they're a ventilator, they manufacture ventilators. They open source their ventilator designs so that companies like Ford or Tesla could actually, you know, they're retooling their factories to build them. Metronics open sources so they could actually get the designs to build. When we see those things, it's just awesome. Like those are great. Like that is what for us, open source is built on. And we are really doubling down to make sure that whether it is a support case or a bug or a problem or we have to jump in and give them engineering expertise to help them scale. That has been our focus probably for most of 2020. In doing that well, I think our challenge, our hard part is just bringing focus from all of the cool things we could do to what are the things that are gonna have the most impact right now, which is, it's tough, but we have a lot of them. Like on the technology side, we have the virtualization areas, some of the work around Quarkis, like how do we bring Java workloads into this Kubernetes world? Like really good things there, but I'm sure what we know right now will unfortunately probably change again in another couple of months. So we just have to be really flexible to keep prioritizing folks on it. All right, well, Matt Hicks, taking a new leadership role is always challenging, especially in these times. So I wanna wish you best of luck and of course, thank you to the team. We always really appreciate the partnership with Red Hat to be able to share this content with the communities and always good to talk to you Matt. That was good, it's great talking to you too. And maybe next year it'll be, we'll be back to the in-person. Absolutely. All right, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.