 Welcome to Amsterdam and KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023. Join John Furrier, Savannah Peterson, Rob Streche, and UPSCOT as the Kube covers the largest conference on Kubernetes, CloudNative, and open source technologies together with developers, engineers, and IT leaders from around the globe. Live coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2023 is made possible by the support of Red Hat, the CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to the Kube's live coverage here in Amsterdam. We're in Europe for KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU. I'm John Furrier, host of the Kube. We're Rob Streche here, my Kube analyst. Got a great guest, Pete Brave with IBM Global Product Executive. And great, great to have you on. IBM, obviously we've been to every IBM event since the Kube started. We've covered all the different events. Just watching the progression, but now more than ever you're seeing the CloudNative world, the IT world modernizing, it's all happening. Your booth's hot and glad you came on. I want to get your perspective, but thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you very much. So talk about what's going on at IBM here at the booth. A lot of traffic, the giveaways we're going to comment on in a minute. It's some great swag, but tons of traffic, a lot of activity. Yeah, lots of activity, and it's really interesting to see the maturity level of the conversations that we're having now with a lot of the people that are showing up at the booth. They're asking more advanced questions about Kubernetes and how to use Kubernetes in their real world environments. You know, topics like how do I back up my Kubernetes applications? How do I restore? How do I handle disaster recovery and things like that? And it's really, it's interesting when I was at Red Hat, I used to talk about this concept of enterprise-ification. I know that's not a word, but enterprise-ification of Kubernetes, you know, and you could see it coming. And really what was exciting, I think, here in Amsterdam is we're seeing those conversations now, which is really interesting. It's interesting to you brought up the enterprise-ification. I like that term because it speaks to how, why Red Hat was successful. They really, you know, we had a big debate, could be another Red Hat. Every five years of the day, can there be another Red Hat? But Red Hat, what they did with Linux early on for enterprise support was the critical thing. But now Kubernetes is coming in from a different angle, a lot more robust ecosystem. And the need for hardened, reliable Kubernetes, but it's got to run with Cloud Native. Yeah. You know, and the other thing that I've noticed here at the show is talking to some of the people like us that have been around a little while, you know, we've kind of lived some of the pains that the Kubernetes community is dealing with right now, like, you know, the topics I just mentioned about disaster recovery. Well, the good news is we kind of already figured out what all the corner cases are and what are the challenges you're going to run into. And what I've seen in the industry now, in the Kubernetes industry in particular, is an acceleration of addressing those issues. So, you know, whereas back in the virtualization days, it may have taken us three to five years to solve a problem, that's being solved in six to nine months now. Yeah, I mean, we were just talking early on, Rob and I were talking like, one of the AI moments that we're seeing right now, just in the past hundred days, I know the papers came out for this show in November, so not a lot of AI in the tracks, but before the cloud, to start a company to do all these things, and then cloud came out, okay, I can provision it on the cloud, get started, and only took this amount of things to do. Now with AI, you can get done with this amount, meaning one person, an engineer or two, and some AI, you can actually build a MVP. So that means more traction quicker is happening, which means projects used to take a longer time are happening faster. What's your reaction to that? What are you seeing? Do you believe it's the same true? And what's your perspective on that? It's really interesting, and Rob and I were just talking about this, the impact of technology, and bringing even AI into the equation here, it's certainly accelerating things, but there's another aspect of the cultural change and the cultural challenges that is posing for these organizations, and the changing roles and the prevalence of some teams versus other teams, being able to address not only how to use the new technology, but how the business can benefit from that technology. Yeah, I think it's interesting because I think that it's actually changed even the buying cycle for some of these companies and who is here at KubeCon. I think some of the conversations have been fascinating. I was talking to the VP of Development for a small IoT company, and he was saying, I've been virtualized for years, now I'm trying to figure out, I know I'm building microservices, but they're packaged in VMs, how do I get to Kubernetes, and where do I go with that, and do I go to a cloud, do I continue on prem? Are these some of the discussions you're seeing at more the CXO level type of things where they're trying to figure out how do we not just take the cloud native apps, but some of the more heavier apps that we had? Yeah, it's really interesting to see this, and the heterogeneous environment that these organizations are dealing with, because a lot of organizations have very built up virtualized infrastructure, and like I said earlier, it's a very well understood problem, but what's happened over the past few years is the prevalence of public cloud solutions has really changed culturally what's going on in these organizations, where you have a situation where app developers can plop down a credit card, be up and running very, very quickly, and not saying that that's shadow IT, but it's certainly causing some issues for these organizations, and how do they get their arms around some of the challenges around budgeting for those things, security, compliance, these are all challenges that these organizations are dealing with, and what's interesting is that a lot of it is coming back to the CIO, and they're being asked, can you help rein this in? We understand you didn't cause the problem, but now you need to help fix it. Yeah, it's a really changing market. I'm really glad we had a chance to bring you on, but I do want to ask two more questions before we wrap up, though. What are you currently working on now? What's your role at IBM? What's your objectives? Obviously here, open source is growing. The market's got to either go to headwind or a tailwind, depending on where you are right now with technology as opportunities. So what's your role? What are you doing right now? Yeah, so I joined IBM last summer, and I'm part of the IBM Fusion team, and when I first started with IBM on the Fusion team, we were thinking of it as a data services platform, but the more we've learned about this market is our customers need more than just the data services. They need a platform to be able to deploy, what we were talking about earlier, to deploy Kubernetes, to bring Kubernetes in very quickly, and the challenge that they're having is it's a brand new technology. They don't have the time to retrain and relearn this new technology. And it is very different, right? You know, you're talking about microservices versus virtual machines. It's a very, very different world, and so they're challenged with that type of thing. So what's exciting about what we're working on with IBM Fusion is we're a deployment platform for Red Hat OpenShift, so we can get OpenShift out there very, very quickly, and a lot of our early customers, we surveyed them in December and we asked them, why did you buy Fusion? And they said, because it accelerates our OpenShift deployment. And so it was really impressive to see that, you know, we're helping these organizations at a much higher level. It's the day two ops on one hand, but also standing up day one operations for cloud is interesting market. Exactly, it's really an acceleration overall, but these organizations are still dealing with these challenges of, you know, you've got a hybrid cloud, right? You know, you can't talk long about IBM, but I was talking about and mentioning hybrid cloud. It is true. I mean, these organizations are facing- You guys, IBM's going great with hybrid cloud and obviously all the enterprise companies and the guys location, as you said, is key, and looking forward to hearing more from you. Final question, I got to put the reporter hat on here. Contribute to the Cube editorial. What's the most important story happening at KubeCon Amsterdam? What are you seeing? What's the story they were talking about and what's the story that's most important that no one's talking about? I think the most important story right now is, and you can sense it in the people that walk into the booth, that they know that this is a very important trend that's happening here. And so they're here to absorb as much and to learn from a lot of the early adopters. So to me, that's the big story. And as I compare back to previous KubeCons, it's really interesting to see the attendees and the conversations that they're having now versus even just six to 12 months ago, it's very much, there's a thirst, there's a desire to understand the technology and how to be able to deploy it. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for coming on. I think Fusion, Red Hat, great combination. Certainly Red Hat continues to be great with OpenShift. We had a lot of the folks come on and share their stories here on the engineering side. So Pete, thanks for coming on the Cube. Yeah, thank you. All right, we could speak in every interview count until they pull the plug on us. It's the Cube. We'll go all day, two days, all day tomorrow. I'm John Furrier, Rob Strecce here. We'll be right back with more interviews. And our swag review with Savannah Peterson coming up next. Stay with us.