 We're back at the Seaport in Boston, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022, a little different this year, smaller venue, maybe 1,000 people, love the keynotes, compressed, big virtual audience, so we're happy to be coming to you live, face-to-face. It's been a while since we've had these comments. For a lot of folks, this is their first in-person event. Yeah, it's kind of weird getting used to that, but I think in the next few months, it's going to become the new quasi-abnormal. Francis Chow is here, he's the vice president and GM of InVehicle OS and Edge at Red Hat Francis. Welcome, that's the most interesting title we've had all week, so thanks for coming with you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Paul, for having me here. So the Edge, I mean, the Edge is, we heard about the International Space Station, we heard about ski boots, of course, InVehicle. What's the Edge to you? Well, to me, Edge actually could mean many different things, right? The way we look at Edge is, there is the traditional enterprise Edge, where this is the second tier, third tier data centers that just extension from your core, the network, and your centralized data center, right, to remote locations. And then there are like telco Edge, right, where we know about the 5G network, right, where you deploy base stations, and which would have a different set of requirements, right, of traditional enterprise Edge networks. And then there are operational Edge, where we see the line of business operating on those locations, things like manufacturing for oil rigs, retail store, right, so a very wide variety of Edge that are doing OT type of technology. And then last but not least, there is the customer-owned or kind of device Edge, where we're not putting things into things like cars, as you said, like ski boots, and have that interaction with the end consumers. Is this why, I mean, there's a lot of excitement at Red Hat, I could tell, among the Red Hat people about this GM deal here. Is this why that's so exciting to them? This really encompasses sort of all of those variants of the Edge in automobile experience, doesn't it? I think why this is exciting to the industry, and also to us, is that if you look at, traditionally, how automotive has designed, right, the way the architect vehicle today has many, many subsystems. They are all purpose-built, very tightly coupled with hardware and software. And it's very difficult to reuse, right? So their cost of development is high. The time to develop is long. And adding to that, there is a lengthy safety certification process, which also kind of make it hard, because every time you make a change in the system, you have to recertify it again. And typically it takes about six to 12 months to do, so every time you make a change. So very lengthy process, which is important because we want to ensure occupants are safe in a vehicle. Now what we bring to the table, which I think is super exciting, is we bring this platform approach. Now you can use a consistent platform that is open, and you can actually now run multiple domain applications on the same platform, which means automakers can reuse components across model years and brands, right? That will lower their development costs. Now I think one of the key things that we bring to the table is that we introduce a new safety certification approach called continuous safety certification. We actually announced that in our summit last year with the intent, hey, we're going to deliver this functionally certified Linux platform, which is the first for Linux, and the way we do it is we work with our partner, Exeter, to try to define that approach. And at a high level, the idea really is to automate that certification process just like how we automate software development, right? We're adding that monitoring capabilities with functional safety related artifacts in our CI-CD pipeline, and we're able to aim to cut back, cut that certification time to a fraction of what is needed today, right? So what we can do, I think, with this collaboration with GM is help them get faster time to market, and then lower development costs. Now adding to that, if you think about a modern Linux platform, you can update it over the air, right? This is the capability that we are working with GM as well. Now what customers can expect now for a future vehicle is there will be updates on apps and services, just like your cell phone, right? Which makes your car more capable over time and more relevant for the long term. So there's some assumptions you're making at the edge. First of all, you described a spectrum, retail store, which to me, okay, it's edge, but you can take an x86 box or a hyperconverged infrastructure, throw it in there, and there's some opportunities to do some stuff in real time, but it's kind of an extension, natural extension of IT, whereas in vehicle, you got to make some assumptions. Spotty connectivity to do software downloads, and you can't do truck rolls at the far edge, right? None of that is okay. And so there's some assumptions there, and as you say, your role is to compress the time to market but also deliver a better consumer experience. So what can we expect? You started to talk about the future in vehicle, you know, or EVs, if you will. What should we expect as consumers? You're saying over-the-air software, we're seeing that with some of the EV makers for sure, but what's the future look like? I think what consumers can expect is really over a period of time, right? A similar experience, like what you have with your mobile device, right? If you look back 15, 20 years, right? You buy a phone, right? That's the feature that you have with your phone, right? No update, it is what it is, right? For the lifetime of the product, which is pretty much what you have now if you buy a vehicle, right? You have those features capabilities and you last it for the lifetime of the vehicle, right? Or sometimes you have to drive in for maintenance and service to get a software update. We're going to talk about that too, right? But as we make the systems updateable, right? You can now expect more frequent and seamless update of both the operating system and the application services that sits on top of that, right? So I think, right, in the future, consumers can expect more capable vehicles after you purchase it because new development of software can now be downloaded and updated over the air. I assume this relationship with GM is not exclusive. Are you talking with other automakers as well? We are talking to other automakers. What we're working with GM is really a product that could work for the industry. Right, this is actually what we both believe in is what I think they do, right? As we're able to standardize how we approach the infrastructure, I think this is a good thing for the whole industry to help accelerate innovation for the entire industry. Which is sort of natural next question. Are we heading toward an open automotive platform like we have an open banking platform in that industry? Do you see the possibility that there could be a single platform that all or most of the automakers will work on? I wouldn't use the word single, but I definitely would use the word open, right? Our goal is to build this open platform, right? Because we believe in open source, right? We believe in community, right? If we make it open, we have more contributors to come in and help to make the system better in a way faster and actually, like you said, right? Improve the quality, right, better, right? So that the chance of recall is now lower with this approach. You're using validated patterns as part of this initiative, is that right? And what is a validated pattern? How is it different from a reference architecture? Is it just kind of a new name for reference architecture? What value does it bring to the relationship? For automotive, right, we don't have a validated pattern yet, but they can broadly kind of speak about what that is and how we see that evolve over time. So a validated pattern basically is a combination of redhead products, multiple redhead products, and partner products. And we usually build it for a specific use case. And then we put those components together, run rigorous tests to validate it, that's gonna work, so that it becomes more repeatable and deployable for those particular edge use cases. Now, we do work with our partners to make it happen, right, because in the end, right, we want to make a solution that is about 80% of the way and allow our partners to kind of add more value and the secret sauce on top and deploy it, right? And I'll give you kind of one example, right, you just had the interview with the reference affairs team, right? One of our patterns, right, the medical diagnosis pattern, right, actually we work with them in the early development stage of that, right? What it does is to help make assessments on pneumonials with chassis rates, right? So it's a fully automated data pipeline. We get the chassis rate from an object store, use AIML to dynos whether there's new pneumonia and then I'll put that in a dashboard, all automated with the validate pattern. So you're not using them today, but can we expect that in the future? Yes, absolutely, it's in the works, yes. Vertical, yes. How do you believe your work with GM, I mean, has implications across Red Hat? It seems like there are things you're gonna be doing with GM that could affect other parts of your own product portfolio. Oh, absolutely, I think this actually is a pivotal moment for Red Hat and the automotive industry and I think broadly speaking for any safety conscious industry, right? As we create this proof point, right, that we can build a Linux system that is optimized for footprint, performance, real time capabilities and be able to certify it for safety, right? I think all the adjacent industry, right, think about transportation, healthcare, right? Industry that have tight safety requirements. It just opened up the aperture for us to adjust those markets in the future. Can we talk about a lot about the consumerization of IT over the last decade? Many of us feel as though that what's going on at the edge, the innovations that are going on at the edge, real time AI inferencing, streaming data, ARM, the innovations that ARM and others are performing, certainly NVIDIA until we heard from today, this notion of no touch, zero touch provisioning, that a lot of these innovations are actually going to find their way into the enterprise, kind of a follow on fault at what you were just talking about and there's probably some future disruptions coming. You can almost guarantee that. I mean, 15 years or so, we get that kind of disruption. How are you thinking about that? Well, I think you, Capiti, right, some of the edge innovation are going to kind of bring back to enterprise over time, but the one thing that you talk about, zero touch provisioning, it's critical. You think about edge deployments. You're going to have to deal with a very diverse set of environment on how deployments that happen. I think about like tailcode base stations. You have somewhere between 75,000 to 100,000 base stations in the US for each provider. How do you deploy it? If you let's say you've pushed one update or you want the provisioning system. So what we bring to the table in the latest open shift release is that, hey, we make provisioning zero touch, right? Meaning you can actually do that without any menu intervention. Yeah, so I think the edge is going to raise the bar for the enterprise, I guess is my premise there. So Francis, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to see you and congratulations on the collaboration. It's an exciting area for you guys. Thank you again, Dave and Paul. Thank you. Our pleasure. After this quick break, we'll be back. Paul Gill and Dave Vellante watching theCUBE's coverage Red Hat Summit 2022 live from the Boston Seaport. We're right back.