 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon plus CloudNativeCon 2020, the virtual edition. Abhinav Joshius here. He's the Senior Product Marketing Manager for OpenShift at Red Hat and Tom Dean is the Senior Director of Product Management at Cloudera. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Good to see you. Thank you for having us here. Hey guys, I know you're- Good to be here. It was great to have you. And guys, I know you're excited about the partnership and I definitely want to get in and talk about that. But before we do, I wonder if we could just set the tone. You know, what are you seeing in the market? Tom, let's start with you. I had a great deep dive a couple of weeks back with Anupam Singh and he brought me up to speed on what's new with Cloudera, but one of the things we discussed was the accelerated importance of data, putting data at the core of your digital business. Tom, what are you seeing in the marketplace right now? Yeah, absolutely. So overall, we're still seeing growing demand for storing and processing massive amounts of data, even in the past few months, where perhaps we see a little bit more variety is on by industry sector, is on the propensity to adopt some of the latest and greatest technologies that are out there or that we deliver to the market. So whether perhaps in the retail hospitality sector, you may see a little bit more risk aversion around so the latest tools, then you go to the healthcare industry as an example and you see, we see a strong demand for our latest technologies with everything that is going on. So overall, still lots of demand around this space. So Abhinav, I mean, we just saw on IBM's earnings, the momentum of Red Hat growing in the mid-teens and the explosion that we're seeing around containers and obviously OpenShift is at the heart of that. How have the last nine months affected your customers' priorities and what are you seeing? Yeah, we've been a lot more busier like in the last few months because there's like a lot of use cases. And if you look at like a lot of the research and so on and we are seeing that from our customers as well, that now the customers are actually speeding up the digital transformation, right? People say that, okay, COVID-19 has actually speeded up the digital transformation for a lot of our customers for the right reasons to be able to help the customers and so on. So we are seeing a lot of traction on like number of verticals and number of use cases beyond the traditional lab dev. Data analytics, AIML, messaging, streaming, the edge and so on, like lots of use cases in like a lot of different like industry verticals. So there's a lot of momentum going on on OpenShift and the broader network portfolio as well. Yeah, it's ironic the timing of the pandemic, but it sure underscores that this next 10 years is going to be a lot different than the last 10 years. Okay, let's talk about some of the things that are new around data. Tom Clodara, you guys have made a number of moves since acquiring Hortonworks a little over two years ago. What's new with the Clodara data platform, CDP? Sure, so yes, our latest platform is called CDP, Clodara data platform. Last year we announced the public cloud version of CDP running on AWS and then Azure. And what's new is just two months ago, we announced the release of the version of this platform targeted at the data center. And that's called CDP private cloud. And really the focus of this platform of this new version has been around solving some of the pain points that we see from agility or time to value and the ease of use of the platform. And to give you some specific examples with our previous technology, you could take a customer three months to provision a data warehouse. If you include everything from obtaining the infrastructure to provisioning the warehouse, loading the data, setting security policies and fine tuning the software. Now with CDP private cloud, we've been able to take those three months and turn it into three minutes. So significant speed up in that onboarding time and time to value. And a key piece of this that enabled this speed up was revamping up entire stack and specifically the infrastructure and services management layer. And this is where the containerization of the platform comes in, specifically Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. That is a key piece of the puzzle that enables this order of magnitude improvement in time. Right. Now I'm enough, when you think about Red Hat, you think about Cloudera, of course, Hortonworks, the stalwarts of open source. You got kind of like birds of a feather. How are Red Hat and Cloudera partnering with each other? What are the critical aspects of that relationship that people should be aware of? Yeah, absolutely. That's a very good question. Yeah, so on the OpenShift side, we've had a lot of momentum in the market and we had well over 2000 customers in terms of a lot of different verticals and the use cases that I talked about at the beginning of our conversation in terms of traditional and cloud native app dev, databases, data analytics, like AI messaging and so on. And the value that you have with OpenShift and the containers, Kubernetes and DevOps, like part of the solution, being able to provide the agility, flexibility, scalability, the cross cloud consistency, like all that that you see in a typical app dev world is directly applicable to fast track the data analytics and the AI projects as well. And we've seen like a lot of customers and some of the ones that we can talk about in a public way. Like RBC Bank, HCA Healthcare, Boston Children's, BMW ExxonMobil. So all these organizations are able to leverage OpenShift to get a speed of the AI projects and help with the needs of the data engineers, data scientists and the app dev folks. Now from our perspective, providing the best in class say, like experience for the customers at the platform level is key. And we have to make sure that the tooling that is a customer's run on top of it, gets the best in class, say experience in terms of the day zero to day two management, right? And it's an ecosystem play for us. And that's the way Cloudera is a top ISV in the space, right? When it comes to data analytics and AI, and there was a key motivation to partner with Cloudera in terms of bringing this joint solution to market and making sure that our customers are successful. So the partnership is at all the different levels in the organization, say both up and down as well as in the engineering level, the product management level, the marketing level, the sales level, and at the support and services level as well. So that way, if you look at the customer journey in terms of selecting a solution, putting in place and then getting the value out of it. So the partnership, it actually spans across the entire spectrum. Yeah, and Tom, I wonder if you could add anything there. I mean, it's not just about the public cloud with containers you're seeing, obviously the acceleration of cloud native principles on-prem and a hybrid or cross clouds. It's sort of the Lynch pin containers really and Kubernetes specifically Lynch pin to enable that. What would you add to that discussion? Yeah, as part of the partnership when we were looking for a vendor who could provide us that Kubernetes layer, we looked at our customer base. And if you think about who Clara is focused on, we really go after the global 2000 firms out there. These customers have very straight security requirements and they're often in these highly-regulated industries. And so when we looked at our customers base, we saw a lot of overlap and there was a natural good fit for us there. But beyond that, just our own technical evaluation of the solutions and also talking to our own customers about who do they see as a trusted platform that could provide enterprise-grade features on a Kubernetes layer, Red Hat had a clear leadership in that front. And that combined with our own long-standing relationship with our parent company, IBM, it made this partnership a natural fit for us. Right, and Cloudera's always had a good relationship with IBM. Tom, I want to stay with you if I can and talk about the specific joint solutions that you're providing with Red Hat. What do you guys bring into customers in terms of those solutions? What's the business impact? Where's the value? Absolutely. So the solution is called CBP or Cloudera Data Platform, Private Cloud on Red Hat OpenShift. And I'll describe the three pillars that make up CBP. First, what we have is the five data analytic experiences that is meant to cover the end-to-end data lifecycle. In the first release, which just came out two months ago, we announced availability of two of those five experiences. We have data warehousing for BI analytics, as well as machine learning and AI, where we offer a collaborative data science tools for data scientists to come together, do exploratory data analytics, but also develop predictive models and push them to production. Going forward, we'll be adding the remaining three experiences. They include data engineering for transformations on your data, data flow for streaming analytics and ingest, as well as operational database for real-time serving of both structured and unstructured data. So these five experiences have been revamped compared to our prior platform to target the specific use cases and simplify these data disciplines. The second pillar that I'll talk about is the SDX, or what we call the Tothera Shared Data Experience. And what this is is the ability for these five experiences to have one global data set that they can all access with shared metadata security, including fine-grained permissions and a suite of governance tools that provide lineage, that provide auditing and business metadata. So by having these shared data experiences, our developers, our users, can build this multidisciplinary workflows in a very straightforward way without having to create all these custom code that can stitch them together. And the last pillar that I'll mention is the containerization of the platform. Because of containers, because of Kubernetes, we're now able to offer that next level of agility, isolation, and infrastructure efficiency on the platform. So a little bit more specific examples on the agility I mentioned going from three months to three minutes in terms of the speedup. With containers, we can now also give our users the ability to bring their own versions of their libraries and engines without colliding with another user who's sharing the platform. That has been a big ask from our customers. And last, I'll mention infrastructure efficiency. By re-architecting our services to running a microservices architecture, we can now bring back those servers in a much more efficient way. We can also auto-scale, auto-suspend, bring all this, as you mentioned, bring all these cloud-native concepts on-premises. And the end result of that is better infrastructure efficiency. Now our customers can do more with the same amount of hardware which overall reduces their total spend on the solution. So that's what we call CDP Product Club. Great, thanks for that. I mean, wow, we've seen really the evolution from the Wild West days of the early days of so-called big data, ungoverned, a lot of shadow data science, maybe not as efficient as we'd like, but certainly today taking advantage of some of those capabilities, dealing with a noisy neighbor problem. Abhinav, I wonder if you could comment on another question I have is, you know, one of the things that Jim Whitehurst talked about when IBM acquired Red Hat was the scale that IBM could bring. And what I always looked at in that context was IBM's deep expertise in vertical industries. So I wonder what are some of the key industry verticals that you guys are targeting and succeeding in? I mean, yes, the pandemic has some effects. We talked about hospitality, obviously airlines have to be careful and conserving cash, but what are some of the interesting tailwinds that you're seeing by industry and some of the more interesting and popular use cases? Yeah, that's a very good question. But in terms of the industry verticals, so we are seeing the traction in like a number of verticals, right? And the top ones being the financial services, like healthcare, telco, the automotive industry, as well as the federal government are some of the key ones, right? And at the end of the day, what all the customers are looking at doing is, be able to improve the experience of their customers with the digital services that they roll out, right as part of the pandemic and so on as well. And then being able to gain competitive edge, right? If you can have the services in your platform and make them kind of fresh and relevant and be able to update them on a regular basis, that's your differentiator these days, right? And then the next one is, yeah, if you do all this, so you should be able to increase your revenue, be able to save cost as well. That's kind of a key one that you mentioned, right? That a lot of the industries like the hospitality, the airlines and so on are kind of working on saving cash, right? So if you can help them save the cost, that's kind of key. And then the last one is being able to automate the business processes, right? Because there's a lot of the manual processes. So if you can add in like a lot of automation, that's all good for your business. And then now, if you look at the individual, the use cases in these different industry, verticals, what we're seeing that the use cases can vary from the industry to industry. Like if you look at the financial services, the use cases like fraud detection, being able to do the risk analysis and compliance, being able to improve the customer support and so on are some of the key use cases. The cybersecurity is coming up a lot as well because nobody wants to be hacked and so on, especially like in these times, right? And then moving on to healthcare and the life sciences, right? What we're seeing the use cases on being able to do the data-driven diagnostics and care and being able to do the discovery of drugs, being able to say track COVID-19 and be able to tell that, okay, which of my hospital is gonna be full when and what kind of PPE am I gonna need and the sites and so on. So that way I can immobilize like as needed are some of the key ones that we are seeing on the healthcare side. And then in terms of the automotive industry, right? That's where being able to speed up the autonomous driving initiatives, being able to do the auto warranty pricing based on the history of the drivers and so on. And then being able to save on the insurance cost is a big one that we are seeing as well for the insurance industries. And then one more like manufacturing, right? Being able to do the quality assurance at the shock floor, being able to do the predictive maintenance on machinery and also be able to do the robotics process automation. So like lots of use cases, the customers are prioritizing but it's very verticalized. It kind of varies from the vertical to vertical but at the end of the day, yeah, it's all about like improving the customer experience, the revenue, saving cost and being able to automate the business processes. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that. We heard a lot about automation. We were covering Ansible, Fest. I mean, just think about fraud. How much fraud detection has changed in the last 10 years? It used to be so slow, you'd have to go through your financial statements to find fraud and now it's instantaneous. Cyber security is critical because the adversaries are very capable. Healthcare is a space where it's ripe for change and now of course with the pandemic, things are changing very rapidly. Automotive, another one in industry that really hadn't seen much disruption and now you're seeing a number of things, autonomous vehicles and basically software on wheels and insurance, great example, even manufacturing, you're seeing a real sea change there. So thank you for that description. Very often in theCUBE, we like to look at joint engineering solutions. That's a gauge of the substance of a partnership. Sometimes you see these Barney deals. You know, there's a press release, I love you, you love me, okay, see ya. But so I wonder if you guys could talk about specific engineering that you're doing. Tom, maybe you could start. Sure. Yeah, so on the engineering and product side, we've, for CPP Private Cloud, we've changed our internal development and testing to run all on OpenShift internally. And as part of that, we have a direct line to Red Hat Engineering to help us solve any issues that we run into. So in the initial release, we started with support of OpenShift 4.3. We're just wrapping up a testing of OpenShift 4.5 and we'll begin with OpenShift 4.6 very soon. On another aspect of their partnership is on being able to update our images to account for any security funnial abilities that are coming up. So with the guidance and help from Red Hat, we've been, we've standardized our Docker images on UBI or the universal base image. And that allows us to automatically get many of these security fixes into our software. The last point that I mentioned here is that it's not just about providing Kubernetes. Red Hat helps us with the end-to-end solution. So there's also, for example, bringing a Docker registry into the picture or providing a secure vault for storing all the secrets. So all these pieces combined make up a strong, complete solution. Actually, the last thing I'll mention is the support aspect, which is critical to our customers. In this model, our customers can bring support tickets to Clara, but as soon as we determine that it may be an issue that related to Red Hat or OpenShift 4.3 can use their help, we have that direct line of communication and automated systems in the backend to resolve those support tickets quickly for our customers. So those are some of the examples of what we're doing on the technical side. Great, thank you. Abhinav, we're out of time, but I wonder if we could just close here. I mean, when we look at our survey data with our data partner, ETR, we see containers, container orchestration, container management generally, and again, Kubernetes specifically is the number one area of investment for companies that has the most momentum in terms of where they're putting their efforts. It's right up there, even ahead of AI and machine learning and even ahead of cloud, which is obviously larger maybe and more mature, but I wonder if you can add anything and bring us home with this segment. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, so one thing I wanna add is in terms of the engineering level, right? We also have like between Clara and Red Hat, the partnership and the sales and the go-to-market levels as well because once you build the integration, it has to be built out in the customer environments as well, right? So that's where we have alignment at the marketing level as well as the sales level. So that way we can like jointly go in and do the customer workshops and make sure the solutions are getting deployed the right way, right? And also we have a partnership at the professional services level as well, right? Where the experts from both the orgs are kind of hand-in-hand to help the customers, right? And then at the end of the day, if you need help with support and that's what Tom talked about that we have the experts on the support side as well. Yeah, and then sort of wrap things up, right? So all the industry research and the customer conversations that we are having are kind of indicating that the organizations are actually increasing the focus on digital transformation with the data and AI being a key part of it. And that's where this strategic partnership between Cloud Era and Red Hat is going to play a big role to help our mutual customers throughout our transition and be able to achieve the goals that they set for their business. Great. Well, guys, thanks so much for taking us through the partnership and the integration work that you guys are doing with customers. It's a great discussion. Really appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks a lot. We really appreciate it. Truly enjoyed the conversation. All right, keep it right there, everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon plus Cloud NativeCon North America, the virtual edition. Keep it right there. Take it back.