 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, of course, this year, instead of all gathering together in San Francisco, we're getting to talk to Red Hat executives, their partners, and their customers, where they are around the globe. I'm your host Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program, Nick Parsett, who is a senior director of technology strategy at Red Hat. He happens to be on a boat in the Bahamas. So Nick, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to be here and it's a great pleasure to work for a company that has always dealt with remote people. So it's really easy for us to do this kind of thing. Yeah, Nick, you know, it's interesting. I've been saying probably for the last 10 years that the challenge of our time is really distributed systems. You know, from a software standpoint, that's what we talk about. And even more so today, number one, of course, the current situation with the global pandemic. But number two, the topic we're going to talk to you about is Edge and 5G. It's obviously gotten a lot of hype. So before we get into that, my understanding, Nick, you know, you came into Red Hat through an acquisition. So give us a little bit about your background and what you work on for Red Hat. About five years ago, a company I was working for in advance that acquired by Red Hat and I've been very lucky in that acquisition where I found a perfect home to express my talent. I've been a free software advocate for the past 20 some years. Always been working in free software for the past 20 years. And Red Hat is really wonderful for that. Yeah, it's interesting, Nick. Yeah, I remember back in the early days we used to talk about free software. Now we don't talk free. It's open source is what we talk about. Free is a piece of what we're doing. But let's talk about, you know, you know, Vons, I absolutely remember they were a partner of Red Hat. Talked to them a lot at some of the open stack shows. So I'm guessing when we're talking about Edge, these are kind of the pieces coming together of what Red Hat had done for years with open stack and with NFB. So what's the solution set you're talking about? Bring us inside how you're helping your customers with these types of solutions. Well, clearly the solution we are trying to put together as to combine what people already have with where they want to go. Our vision for the future is a vision where OpenShift is delivering a common service on any platform including hardware at the far edge on a model where both VMs and containers can be hosted on the same machine. However, there is a long road to get there. And until we can fulfill all the needs, we are going to be using combination of OpenShift, OpenStack and many other product that we have in our portfolio to fulfill the needs of our customer. We've seen, for example, Verizon starting with OpenStack quite a few years ago now going with us with OpenShift that they're going to place on top of OpenStack or directly on their metal. We've seen other big telcos use that in very successful to deploy their 5G networks. There is great capabilities in the existing portfolio. We are just expanding that, simplifying it because when we are talking about the edge, we are talking about managing thousands if not millions of device and simplicity is key if you do not want to have your management increase. Excellent. So you talked a lot about the service providers. Obviously 5G is a big wave coming, a lot of promise as to what it will enable both for the service providers as well as the end users. Help us understand where that is today and what we should expect to see in the coming year or so. So in respect of 5G, there is two reason why 5G is important. One, it is important in terms of edge strategy because any person deploying 5G will need to deploy compute resources much closer to the antenna if they want to be able to deliver the promise of 5G and the promise of very low latency. The second reason it is important is because it allows to build a network of things which do not need to be interconnected other than through a 5G connection. And this simplifies a lot some of the edge application that we are going to see where sensors need to provide data in a way where you're not necessarily always connected to a physical network and maintaining a Wi-Fi connection is really complex and costly. Yeah, Nick, a lot of pieces that sometimes get confused or conflated. Want you to help us connect the dots between what you're talking about for edge and what's happened in the telcos and the broader conversation about hybrid cloud or Red Hat calls at the open hybrid cloud because there were some articles that were like, edge is going to kill the cloud. I think we all know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is all additive. So how do these pieces all go together? So for us at Red Hat, it's very important to build the edge as an extension of our open hybrid cloud strategy. Clearly what we are trying to build is an environment where developers can develop workloads once and then can the administrator that needs to deploy a workload or the business night that needs to deploy a workload can do it on any footprint. And the edge is just one of these footprints as is the cloud, as is a private environment. So really having a single way to administer all these footprints, having a single way to define the workloads running on it is really what we are achieving today and making better and better in the years to come. The reality of the process of data as close as possible to where the data is being consumed or generated. So you have new footprints to let's say summarize or simplify or analyze the data where it is being used. And then you can limit the traffic to a more central site to only the essential of it. It is clear that with the current growth of data, there won't be enough capacity to have all the data going directly to the central cloud. And this is what the edge is about making sure we have intermediary points of processing. Yeah, absolutely. So Nick, you talked about OpenStack and OpenShift. Of course, there's OpenSource project with OpenStack and OpenShift, the big piece of that is Kubernetes. When it comes to edge, are there other OpenSource projects but parts of the foundations out there that we should highlight when looking at these edge solutions? Oh, there's a tremendous amount of projects that are pertaining to the edge. Red Hat carries many of these projects in its portfolio. The middleware components, for example, Quarkus or our AMQ mechanism, Kaka are very important components. We've got storage solutions that are super important also when you're talking about storing or handling data. You've got in our management portfolio two very key tool, one called Ansible that allows to configure remotely components that is super handy when you need to reconfigure firewall in mass. You've got another tool that is a central piece of our strategy, which is called ACM, Red Hat. I forgot the name of the product now. We are using the acronym all the time, which is our central management mechanism, just delivered to us through IBM. So this is a portfolio wide we are making and I forgot the important one, which is Rail, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is delivering very soon a new version that is going to enable easier management at the edge. Yeah, well, of course, we know that Rail is the core foundational piece, fits with most of the solution in their portfolio. That's really interesting how you laid that out though, as some people on the outside look and say, okay, Red Hat's got a really big portfolio. How does it all fit together? You just discussed that all of these pieces become really important when they come together for the edge. So maybe one of the things when we get together at Summit, of course, we get to hear a lot from your customers. So any customers you can talk about that might be a good proof point for these solutions that you're talking about today. So right now, most of the proof points are in the telco industry because these are the first one that have made the investment in the edge. And when we are talking about Verizon, we are talking about very large investments that is reinforced in their edge strategy. We've got customers in telco all over the world that are starting to use our products to deploy their 5G networks. And we've got lots of customer starting to work with us on creating their edge strategy for in other vertical, particularly in the industrial and manufacturing sector, which is our next endeavor after telco yet. Yeah, well, absolutely. Verizon, a customer I'm well familiar with when it comes to what they've been used with Red Hat. I'd interviewed them at OpenStack a few years back when they talked about those NFV type solutions. You brought up manufacturing. So that brings up one of the concerns when you talk about edge or specifically about IoT environment. When we did some original research looking at the industrial internet, the boundaries between the IT group and the OT, which heavily lives in manufacturing, they don't necessarily talk or work together. So how's Red Hat helping to make sure that customers, go through these transitions, bust through those silos and can take advantage of these sorts of new technologies? Well, obviously you have to look at a problem in your entirety. You've got to look at the change management aspect. And for this, you need to understand how people interact together if you intend on modifying the way they work together. You also need to ensure that the requirements of one are not impeding the other. An environment of a manufacturer is really important, especially when we are talking about dealing with IoT sensors, which have very limited security capabilities. So you need to add in the appropriate security layers to make what is not secure secure. And if you don't do that, you're going to introduce a friction. And you also need to ensure that you can delegate administration of the component to the right people. You cannot say, oh, from now on, all of what you used to be controlling on a manufacturer floor is now controlled centrally and you have to go through this form in order to have anything modified. So having the flexibility in our tooling to enable the respect of the existing organization and handle a change management the appropriate way is our way to answer this problem. Great, Nick, last thing for you, obviously this is a maturing space, lots of change happening. So give us a little bit of a look forward as to what users should be affecting and what pieces will the industry and Red Hat be working on to bring full value out of the Edge and 5D solution? So as always, any such changes are driven by the applications. And what we are seeing is in terms of application a very large predominance of requirements for AI, ML and data processing capability. So reinforcing all the components around this environment is one of our key addition that we are making as we speak. You can see Chris keynote, which is going to demonstrate how we are enabling a manufacturer to process the signal sent from multiple sensors through an AI and doing early failure detection. You can also expect us to enable more and more complex use case in terms of footprint. Right now we can do very small data center that are residing on three machines. Tomorrow we'll be able to handle remote worker nodes that are on the single machine. Further along we'll be able to deal with disconnected node, a single machine acting as a cluster. All these are elements that are going to allow us to go further and further in the complication of the use cases. It's not the same thing when you have to connect a manufacturer that is on solid grounds with fiber access, or when you have to connect an oil rig for example, or a boat and talk about that too. Well, Nick, thank you so much for all of the updates. I know there's some really good breakouts. I'm sure there's lots on the Red Hat website to find out more about Edge in 5B. So Nick Barsett, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. All right, back with lots more covered from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks always for watching theCUBE.