 Hey everyone, welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Ferrier. We're live with theCUBE at Ansible Fest 2022. This is not only Ansible's 10th anniversary, John, but it's the first in-person event in three years, about 14 to 1500 people here talking about the evolution of automation, really the democratization opportunities that Ansible is providing. And this segment's going to be great. Keep alumni back and we're going to get industry perspective on the automation journey. So it should be great. It will be great. Two alumni back for the price of one. Scott Kanane joins us. Director of Worldwide Automation at Kendral. Nelson Shu is back as well. Product Marketing Director at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you back on the live CUBE. Oh, thank you for having us. And it's really great to be back here live in person and get a chance to see you guys again. Well, and also you get such a sense of the actual Ansible community here and it's only a fraction of them that are here, but people are ready to be back. They're ready to collaborate in person. And I always can imagine the amount of innovation that happens at these events, just like off the show floor, people bumping into each other and go, hey, I had this idea. What do you think? Scott, it's been just about a year since Kendral was formed. Talk to us about the last close to a year and what that's been like, especially as the world has been so topsy turvy. Yeah, exactly. Topsy turvy, people getting back to working in person and everything else, but throw on that what we've done in the last year, taking Kendral outside of being a part of IBM, right, in our own company at this point. And you hear a lot of our executives and a lot of our people when we talk about it, like, oh yeah, it's a $19 billion startup. We got freedom of action. We can do all these different things. But one of the ways I look at it is we are a $19 billion startup, which means we've got a lot of companies out there that are trusting us to, no matter what change we're doing, continue to deliver their operations, do it flawlessly, do it in a way so they can continue to service their clients effectively. And don't break them. And so that, to me, the way we do that and the way I focus on that is automation. Ansible's obviously core to our strategy getting there. Yeah, and I'd like to get your thoughts too, because we've seen a trend and we've been reporting on this. With the cloud growth and the scale of cloud and distributed computing going cloud native, the automation is the front and peace center of all conversations. Automate this, developers go faster. And with the pandemic, we're coming out of that pandemic of you post pandemic with, large scale automation system architecture, a lot more like architectural conversations and customers leaning on new things. What are you seeing in this automation framework that you guys are talking about? What's been the hot playbook or recipe or architecture to play on words there? But I mean, this is kind of the key focus. Yeah, I mean, if you, one of the things that customer talks I've been pulled into a lot recently have all been around thinking about security, right? A lot in terms of security and compliance. I mean, think about the world environment as a whole right here, everything that's been going on. So people are conscious of how much energy that's being used in their data centers, right? People are conscious of how secure they are, right? Are they, their end customers are trusting them with data information about them, right? And they're trusting us to make sure that those systems are secure, to make sure that all that is taken care of in the right way. And so, what's hot security and compliance, right? What can we do in the energy space? Can we do things to help clients understand better their energy consumption as, especially as we get now in Europe to the winter months can we do things there that'll help them also be better in that space, right? And reduce their costs. And a lot more cloud rails obviously is in right there. You got Improsa and you got now Ansible. They're kind of there to help the customers put it together at scale. This has been the big conversation. Last year, remember it was automate, automate, automate. This year it's automation everywhere and every piece of the landscape. Edge has been big discussion tomorrow we'll hear about event-driven stuff. This is kind of a change of focus and scope. Can you share your thoughts on how you see how big this is in terms of the customer journey? I'm sorry. In terms of their architecture, how they're rolling out automation. Yeah, yeah, so in terms of their rolling out, in terms of them consuming architecture, right? In the architecture or consuming automation and rolling out the architecture for how they do that. You know again, to me it's a lot of it's been focused around how do we do this in the most secure manner possible? How do we deliver the service to them in the most secure manner possible? How do they understand that they can trust the automation and it's doing the right things on their environments, right? So it's not, you know, we're not pushing out or it's not making bad policies. And they're leaning on you guys being. It's not being putting malware out there, right? At the same time, we're doing some things. And so they really rely on, our customers rely on us to really help them with that journey. I think a big part of that with Kendra is such a great partner and so many customers trusting them. It's a fact that they really understand that enterprise. And so as Scott talks about the security aspect, we're not just talking to the IT operations people, right? We're talking across the enterprise, the security, the infrastructure and the automation around that. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, we talk about network and security, edge is a natural conversation to that. Because absolutely at the edge, network and security automation is critical. Otherwise how are you going to manage just the size of your edge as it grows? And we've been, and that's another area that we've been having a lot more conversations with clients on is how do you do automation for IoT and edge-based devices, right? We traditionally, data center, cloud, kind of the core pieces of where we've been focusing on. But recently I've been seeing a lot more opportunities and a lot more companies coming forward saying, help us with the network space, help us with the IoT space. We really want to start getting to that level of automation and that part of our environments. And what are some of the key barriers that customers are coming to you with, saying help us overcome these so that they can, you're smiling, so that they can obviously attract and retain the right talent and also be able to determine what processes to automate to extract the most value and the most ROI for the organization. Yeah, and that's an interesting, the ROI conversations always an interesting one, right? Because when you start having that with customers of some of the first things they think about, the first, the natural place people go is, oh, labor takeout, I can do this with less people, but that's not the end-all, be-all of automation. In fact, my personal view is that's, maybe the bottom 30%, right? That's kind of, then you have to think about the value you get above and beyond that, standard operation, standardized processes, right? How are you gonna be able to do those faster? How is that enabling your business? What's all the risks that's now been taken out by having these changes codified, right? By having them done in a manner that is repeatable, scalable, and really gets them to the point of what their business needs from an operational standpoint. And instructing that value. Nelson, talk about the automation journey from your perspective. How have you seen that evolve from your lens, especially over the last couple of years? It's a great question. It's interesting because obviously all of our customers are at different stages of their automation journey. We have some of them just beginning, looking at automation, they've been doing old scripts, if you will, the past. And then we have more that are embracing it as a culture. So we have customers that are building cultures of automation, right? They have stand-ups, they have automation guilds. It's kind of a little bit of a click. It's kind of building up steam in that momentum. And then we have the clients that Kindrow works with, right? And they're very much focused on automation because they understand that they have a lack of resources. They don't have the expertise. They don't have the time to be able to deliver all this. And that's really, Kindrow really comes into effect to really help those customers accelerate their automation, right? And to that point, you know, we're doing a lot of innovation work with Kindrow. And we lean on them heavily because, you know, they're willing to make that commitment as a partner, both on the day-to-day work that we do together, as well as forward-looking at different architectures. And the community aspect from our side internally has been tremendous in terms of us being able to expand what we're doing with automation and what, A, if he's been able to do with that community to get there, right? So to last month, we did about 33 million day-one, day-two operations through automation, right? So that's what we've done. If you look at it, you know, if I break it down, it's really 80% of that standard global process stuff that we bring to the table. 20% of that is what our account teams are bringing specifically to their clients based on their needs and what they need to get done, right? You know, one of my favorite examples of this, right? We have an automation example out there for a client we've got in Japan, right? They tie, you know, they're obviously concerned about, you know, securing a client, everything else that we've been talking about. They're also concerned about resiliency, right? In the face of natural disasters. So they took our automation, they said, okay, we're going to tie your platform to seismic data that's coming through. And we understand what seismic data is happening, okay? It's hitting a certain event that's automatically start kicking off resiliency operations so we can be prepared. And thus keep serving our clients when that's happening, right? And that's not something like when you talk about a global team coming in and saying, we're going to do all this. It's that community aspect, getting the account focus, getting to that level, right? That's, really brings value to clients. And that's one of the use cases, you know, that AAP's enabled us to do with the community approach we've got. Now, so talk about this, Partishka. I think earlier, when we were talking to Stephanie and Tom, the bottoms up, Ansible community with top down kind of business objectives kind of come into play. You guys have a partnership where it's some game changing things happening because Ansible's growing, continuing to have that scope grow from a skill set standpoint, expand the horizons, doing more automation at scale. And then you got business objectives where people want to move faster in their digital transformation. So to me, it's interesting that this part kind of hits both. It does really hit both. I mean, you know, the community cloud that Kindrel has is so critical, right? Because they build that CACF architecture internally, but they follow that community mantra, if you will. And community is so important to us, right? And that's really where we find innovation. So together with what we were discussing about validated content earlier today becomes critical to build that content, to really help people get started, right? Validated content, content they can depend on and deliver, right? So that becomes critical. On the other side, as you mentioned is the reality of how do we get this done, right? How do we mature? How do we accelerate? And without the ability to drive those solutions to them to fix, if you want the products that the line of business has, well, if you don't answer those questions with the innovation, with the community, and then with the AP, it's got to all come together. I mean, that community framework is interesting. I think we hear a lot in theCUBE, you know, hey, let's do this, sounds good. Who's going to do it? Someone, who's the operator? So there's a little skills gap going on. There's also a transformation in the roles of the operators in particular, and the devs. So the dev ops equation is completely going to the next level. This is where people want to move faster. So you see a lot more managed services, a lot more services that's, I won't say so much top down, but more like, let's do it and here's a play to get it done. Then backfill on the hiring, whether it's taking on a little bit of technical debt or going a little faster to get the proof points. Right. And I think one of the critical aspects is, Ansible has its certified collections, right? And oftentimes, I meet with customers two, three times a week, right? There's not a single one that doesn't emphasize the importance of partners and the importance of certified collections, right? And kindred was included in that, right? Because they bring a lot of those certified collections, use them, leverage them. It helps customers get a jump start, right? It's a few, well, it's their easy button, right? But they only get that and they value that because of the support that's there, right? They get the wins. Yeah, it's just adding on the certified collections, right? So it was great to see the hub come out with those capabilities because, as we've gone through the last 12 months and changed one of the things that we focused more in on is network devices, network support, right? And so some of the certified collections out there for Cisco, for F5, right? Some of those things, we've been able to take back in and now build on top of what the expertise that we have in that space as well and then use that as a starting point to divert more value for our clients. How is Kindred working together with Red Hat and with Ansible to help organizations? Like you mentioned, Nelson, the journey varies considerably. Some are well on their way, others aren't. But for those to really start developing an automation-first culture, we talked a lot about culture, we talked about it this morning, you could feel the power of that community in driving it. But how do you guys work together to help companies and any industry kind of really start understanding what an automation-first culture is and then building it internally and getting some grounds well? Well, it's interesting, right? One of the things that really is, we've found really helpful is assessments, right? So you have silos and pockets of automation and that's that challenge, right? So to be able to bring that, if you are an automation community within an enterprise together, we often go out and we'll do an assessment, an automation assessment. To really understand holistically how the enterprise could leverage automation, not just in the pockets, but to bring it together. And when they bring that automation together, they can share playbooks, can share their experiences, right? And with Kindle and the practices they have, right, they really bring that home from an industry perspective. They also bring that home, if you will, from a technology perspective and they bring that together. So, you know, Kindle in that respect is the glue for our customer success. What's the next big thing that you guys see? Because if this continues down the road, this path, people are going to get the wins, they're going to get the successes, new beachhead, if you will, is established. You've got the edge around the corner. What's next for you guys in the partnership? How do you see it developing? No, it's all good. So really, you know, I mentioned it earlier and the automation journey paralleled by innovation, right? Customers today are automating, they're doing a great job, there's multiple tools out there, we understand we're not going to be the only tool in the shed. But Ansible can come in and integrate that entire environment. And in a hybrid cloud environment, you want that there, right? I think what next is, obviously the hybrid cloud is critical. The edge is critical, right? And I think that, you know, the needs and the requirements that Kindle hears that we have is kind of that future. And, you know, we often, often in Red Hat we talk about a North Star, right? And when I work with partners like Kindle, we talk about the North Star where we want to get to. And that is the acceleration of automation. And I think both by the practical aspect of working with our customers and the innovation as partners, as business partners, technology partners, will help accelerate that. Scott, your perspective to bridge the future is obviously hybrid and edge. How are you bringing your customers along? So we see, you know, when I talk about my automation strategy, our automation strategy, right? It's about being automated, orchestrated, and intelligent, right? Kind of those three layers of the stack. We've been building out a lot of work what we call our integrated AI ops layer for actionable insights, right? We've got a goal to integrate that. And we have integrated into our automation service for how we're delivering the whole package to our clients. So they can better see opportunities for automation. What's the best way to go about it? You know, what are some of the issues they have, vulnerabilities they have in their environment, and really bringing it to them in a real holistic manner. In fact, internally, we call it our F5 steering wheel, right, based on the racing thing, right? Because you think about the racing cars, F5s, they're right there, right? They've got everything they need in front of them. So our goal's been to include that into our automation view and service and build that out, right? So that's one way we're doing it. The additional way is through some announcements you've probably heard, hopefully heard in the last couple of weeks through something called Kendra Bridge, right? Kendra Bridge is more the digitization of the way we deliver services for our clients to make it easier for them to consume and to make the barrier to entry for things like getting automation, getting it more in their environment, lower as much as possible, right? So really, integrated AI ops, Kendra Bridge, those are really the two ways we see it as going forward. It's interesting, you know, we live through all these different inflection points in the industry. Every time there's a big inflection point that's more complex, it needs to be tamed, you know? And so you've got innovation, you've got innovation coming and you've got the clients want to simplify and tame the complexity. This is a big part of what you guys do. Absolutely, yeah, I mean, how do we, you know, most, when the clients come to us, right? Like I said, it's about trust. They trust us to do it because we can make it easy for them to not have to worry about that, right? They don't have to worry about what it takes to secure the environment, manage it, run it, design it, build it for the cloud. We give them the ability to, we give them the ability to focus on their core business while we do the stuff that's important to them. Which is absolutely critical that you can't emphasize trust in this relationship enough. I wish we had more time, guys. You're going to have to come back. I think that's basically what this is pointing down to. But thanks so much, guys, for talking with John and me about how Kendral and Ansible are working together, really enabling your customers to unlock the value of automation across their organization and really make some big business changes. We appreciate your insights and your time. Absolutely. Thank you guys. Happy to do it and happy to do it anytime. Thank you guys too. All right, our pleasure. Thank you so much. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago. This is day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 22. Don't go anywhere. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.