 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE, virtual coverage of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We're not face-to-face this year. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're bringing it together remotely. We're in the Palo Alto Studios with theCUBE and we're going remote for our guests this year and hope you can come together online, enjoy the content of course, go check out the event site, on-demand, live, and certainly after a lot of great content. Got a great guest, Skyla Loomis, Vice President for the Z Application Platform at IBM, also known as IBM Z, talking mainframe. Skyla, thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So, you know, I've talked many conversations about the mainframe after being relevant and valuable in context to cloud and cloud native because if it's got a workload, you got containers and all this good stuff, you can still run anything on anything these days by integrating it in with all this great glue layer. Lack of a better word. I'm oversimplifying it, you know, things going on. So it's really kind of cool. Plus, Walter Bentley in my previous interview was talking about the success of Ansible and at IBM working together on a really killer implementation, so I want to get into that. But before that, let's get into IBM Z. How did you start working with IBM Z? What's your role there? Yeah, so I actually just got started with Z about four years ago. I spent most of my career actually on the distributed platform, largely with data and analytics area databases and both on-premise and public cloud, but I always considered myself a friend to Z. So in many of the areas that I'd worked on, we'd had offerings where we'd enabled it to work with COS or Linux on Z. And then I had this opportunity come up where I was able to take on the role of leading some of our really core run times and databases on the Z platform, IMS and ZTPF. And then recently just expanded my scope to take on kicks and a number of our other offerings related to those kind of in this whole application platform space. And I was really excited because, you know, just of how important these run times in this platform is to the world, really. You know, it powers two thirds of our Fortune 100 clients across banking and insurance. And it's, you know, some of the most powerful transaction platforms in the world, you know, doing hundreds of billions of transactions a day and, you know, just something that's really exciting to be a part of and everything that it does for us. It's funny how distributed systems and distributed computing really enable more longevity of everything. And now with cloud you got new capabilities so it's super excited. You're seeing that big theme at AnsibleFest, this idea of connecting, making things easier. You know, we're talking about distributed computing. The cloud is one big distributed computer. So everything's kind of playing together. You have a panel discussion at AnsibleFest virtual. Could you talk about what your topic is and share what was some of the content in there? Content being, content as in your presentation, not content, let's go. Absolutely. Yeah, so I had the opportunity to co-host a panel with a couple of our clients. So we had Phil Allison from Black Knight and Pat Lane from Allstate. And they were really joining us and talking about their experience now starting to use Ansible to manage to ZOS. So we just actually launched some content collections and helping to enable and accelerate clients' use of using Ansible to manage to ZOS back in March of this year. And we've just seen tremendous client uptake in this. And these are a couple of clients who've been working with us and are getting started on the journey of now using Ansible with Z. They're both have it in the enterprise already working with Ansible and other platforms. And we got to talk with them about how they're bringing it into Z, what use cases they're looking at, the type of culture change that it drives for their teams as they embark on this journey and where they see it going for them in the future. You know, this is one of the hot items this year. I know the event's virtual so there's a lot of content flowing around and sessions. But collections is the top story. A lot of people talk about collections, collections, collections. You know, integration and partnering. It hits so many things. But specifically, I like this use case because you're talking about real business value. And I want to ask you specifically when you were in that use case with Ansible and Z, people are excited. It seems like it's working well. Can you talk about what problems that it solves? I mean, what was some of the drivers behind it? What were some of the results? Could you give some insight into, you know, was it a pain point? Was it an enabler? Can you just share why that was getting, people are getting excited about this? Yeah, well, I certainly automation on Z is not new. You know, there's decades worth of automation on the platform, but it's all often proprietary, you know, or it bundled up like individual teams or individual people on teams have specific assets, right? That they've built and it's not shared. And it's certainly not consistent with the rest of the enterprise. And, you know, more and more, you were kind of talking about hybrid cloud, you know, we're seeing that, you know, an application is not isolated to a single platform anymore, right? It really spans. And so being able to leverage this common open platform to be able to manage Z in the same way that you manage the entire rest of your enterprise, whether, you know, that's Linux or Windows or network or storage or anything, right? You know, you can now actually bring this all together into a common, you know, a common automation plane and control plane to be able to manage to all of this. It's also really great from a skills perspective. So, you know, it enables us to really be able to leverage, you know, Python on the platform. And that's a whole ecosystem of Ansible skills that are out there and be able to now use that to work with Z. So it's essentially a modern abstraction layer of agility and people to work on it, you know? It's not the joke of, hey, where's that COBOL programmer? I mean, this is a serious skill gap issues though. This is what we're talking about here. You don't have to replace the, kill the old to bring in the new. This is an example of integration where it's classic abstraction layer and evolution. Is that, am I getting that right? Absolutely. I mean, I think that Ansible's power as an orchestrator is part of why, you know, it's been so successful here because it's not trying to rip and replace and tell you that you have to rewrite anything that you already have. You know, it is that glue, sort of like to use that term earlier, right? It's that glue that can span, you know, whether you've got rec, whether you've got ACL, whether you're using ZOSMF, you know, or any other kind of custom automation on the platform. You know, it works with everything and it can start to provide that transparency into it as well and move to that like infrastructure as code type of culture. So you can bring it into source control. You can have visibility to it as part of the Ansible Automation Platform and Tower and those capabilities. And so, you know, it really becomes a part of the whole enterprise and enables you to codify a lot of that knowledge that, you know, exists again in pockets or in individuals and make it much more accessible to, you know, anybody new who's coming to the platform. That's a great point, gradient sets worth calling out. I want to make a note of that and make a highlight from that insight. That was awesome. I got to ask about this notion of client uptake. You know, when you have ZOS and Ansible kind of coming together, what are the clients area? When do they get excited? When do they know that they got to do it? What are some of the client reactions? Are they like, wake up one day and say, hey, I should put Ansible and ZOS together, you know? Peanut butter and chocolate and the receipts. You know, it's just one of those things where it's not obvious, right? Or is it? Actually, I have been surprised myself at how like resoundingly positive and immediate the reactions have been. You know, we have something, one of our general managers runs a general managers advisory council and it's some of our top clients on the platform and you know, we meet with them regularly to talk about, you know, the future direction that we're going. And we first brought this idea of Ansible managing to Z there and literally unanimously everybody was like, yes, give it to us now. It was pretty incredible. You know, and so it, you know, we've really just seen an amazing uptake. We've had over 5,000 downloads of our core collection on Galaxy. And again, that's just since mid to late March when we first launched. So, you know, we're really seeing tremendous excitement with it. You know, I want to talk about some of the new announcements, but you brought that up. I wanted to kind of tie into it. It is addictive when you think modernization, people's success is addictive. This is another theme coming out of Ansible Fest this year is that when the sharing, the new content, you know, Coda's content is the theme. I got to ask you because you mentioned early about the business value and how the clients are kind of gravitating towards they want it is addictive, contagious. And Ivory Tower is in the big, you know, front office of the business. It's like, we got to make everything as a service. Right? You know, you hear that, right? You know, and say, okay, okay, boss, you know, just go do it. Okay, okay. It's so easy. You can just do it tomorrow. But to make everything as a service, you got to have the automation, right? So, you know, to bridge that gap as everything as a service, whether it's mainframe, I mean, okay, mainframe is no problem. If you're going to talk about observability and microservices and DevOps, eventually everything's going to be a service. You got to have the automation. Could you share your commentary on how you view that? Because again, it's a business objective. Everything is a service. Then you got to make it technical. Then you got to make it work and so on. So, put your thoughts on that. Absolutely. I mean, agility is a huge theme that we've been focusing on. We've been delivering a lot of capabilities around a cloud native development experience for folks working on COBOL, right? Because absolutely, you know, there's a lot of languages coming to the platform. Java is incredibly powerful and it actually runs better on Z than it runs on any other platform out there. And so, you know, we're seeing a lot of clients, you know, starting to, you know, modernize and, you know, continue to evolve their applications because, you know, the platform itself is incredibly modern, right? I mean, we come out with new releases. We're leading the industry in a number of areas around resiliency and our security and all of our, you know, the face of encryption and a number of things we've come out with. But, you know, the applications themselves are what, you know, has not always kept pace with the rate and change in the industry. And so, you know, we're really trying to help enable our clients to make that leap and continue to evolve their applications in an important way. And the automation and the tools that go around it become very important. So, you know, one of the things that we're enabling is a self-service, you know, provisioning experience, right? So clients can, you know, from OpenShift be able to, you know, say, hey, give me an IMS and ZOS Connect stack or a Kix and a DB2 stack. And that is all under the cover is going to be powered by Ansible Automation so that really, you know, you can get your system programmers and your talent out of having to do these manual tasks, right? Enable the development of community so they can use things like VS Code and Jenkins and GitLab and, you know, have this automated CI CD pipeline. And again, Ansible under the covers can be there helping to provision those test environments, you know, move the data, you know, along with the application changes through the pipeline and really just help to support that so that, you know, our clients can do what they need to do. You guys got the collections in the hub there. So, automation hub, I got to ask you, where do you see the future of the automating within ZOS going forward? Yeah, so I think, you know, one of the areas that we'd like to see go is head more towards this declarative state so that you can, you know, have this declarative configuration defined for your Z environment and then, you know, have Ansible really with its item potency, right? Be able to go out and ensure that the environment is always there and meeting those requirements. You know, that's partly a culture change as well which goes along with it, that's a key area and then also just, you know, along with that, becoming more proactive overall. Part of, you know, AI ops, right, that's happening and I think Ansible and the automation that we support can become, you know, an integral piece of supporting that more intelligent and proactive operational direction that, you know, we're all going. Awesome, Skyl, you're great to talk to and so insightful, appreciate it. One final question, I want to ask you a personal question because I've been doing a lot of interviews around skill gaps and cybersecurity and there's a lot of jobs, more job openings than there are roll people and people are with COVID working at home, people are looking to get new skilled up positions, new opportunities, again, cybersecurity and spaces and event we did and want to, you know, obviously it's huge, huge openings but for people watching who are, you know, resetting, getting through this COVID want to come out on the other side, and there's a lot of online learning tools out there. What skill sets do you think? Because you brought up this point about modernization and bringing new people in and people's a big part of this event and the role of the people in community. What areas do you think people could really double down on if I wanted to learn a skill or an area of coding and business policy or integration services, solution architects, there's a lot of different personas but what skills can I learn? What's your advice to people out there? Sure, I mean, the Z platform overall and skills related to Z, COBOL, right? There's like two billion lines of COBOL out there in the world, it's certainly not going away and there's a huge need for skills and if you've got experience from other platforms I think bringing that in, right? And really being able to kind of then bridge the two things together, right? For the folks that you're working for and the enterprise you're working with, you know, we actually have a bunch of education out there got to master the mainframe program and even a competition that goes on that's happening now for folks who are interested in getting started at any stage whether you're a student or later in your career but, you know, learning, you know a lot of those platforms, you know you're going to be able to then have a career for life. Yeah, and the scale on the data this is so much going on, it's super exciting. Thanks for sharing and I appreciate it I want to get that plug in there and of course, IBM, hey, you learned COBOL you'll have a job forever. I mean, the mainframe's not going away. Absolutely. Skylar, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Vice President for the Z application platform at IBM. Thanks for commenting, appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here for AnsibleFest 2020 Virtual. Thanks for watching.