 Welcome back to theCUBE's end-to-end coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023 and AnsibleFest. Paul Gillan here with Rob Stretch A, and we're going to talk about partnerships. And Rob, partner ecosystems are the new oil that drives the technology industry, wouldn't you say? It's super important, especially in open source. And I think that it's really fun to be here with Stephanie and to talk about these ecosystems. Stephanie Chair, Senior Vice President, Red Hat Partner Ecosystem Success. And certainly partnerships are one of the things that Red Hat is known for. You're a very busy person at this conference. Absolutely, it's great. It's great to be back in full swing at Summit. Last year it was a little small, coming out of COVID and things, but it's great to be surrounded by so many customers and partners. What was it like maintaining those partner relationships during COVID? I think it was a time when everyone was trying to get through, stay connected in the best way we could. Everyone was going through the same thing. Communication in an ecosystem is essential, right? That's what it comes down to. It was a little tougher then. It's nice to sort of feel like the air has lifted. We're all traveling again. We're visiting one another again. It's great. What, tomorrow we're going to have, I believe Microsoft's on the agenda tomorrow. Microsoft was on with us today. We were able to talk with Microsoft today. I think one of the things here at Summit that we've been trying to do, I'm sure everyone has seen the product announcements, but in addition, we didn't want ecosystem to be so integral in not only how we build things with the upstream community, but how we co-create solutions with partners and then how we get those capabilities into the hands of customers, all done with partners. We've tried to work throughout Summit, the presence of partners and the customers who have benefited from the joint work that we've done. So today we had Microsoft and Amadeus on. Tomorrow we'll have AWS on and Solonis in order to talk through that. And Dell made a big announcement on Monday, building upon some work that we've done in co-creating around Apex Cloud platforms. We'll have them on stage as well. They're having Dell Tech World at the same time. So we'll get to talk about that tomorrow on stage here at Summit as well. So you're working with all the major cloud providers as well as companies like HP and Dell that are doing their own type of cloud. How do you maintain the confidentiality that's needed to work with each of these partners and system providers that compete so vigorously with each other? Yeah, it is essential that we do that. Clearly we do some organizational things in order to protect and maintain confidentiality between. I think the place where we always agree with partners is when we're focused on a customer situation and a customer use case. We try and focus on what are either an individual customer or what are we seeing in the market customers want to do and we focus on problem solving together between their capabilities and our capabilities. We stay focused on that. That way it helps keep us. How do we take, in the case we talked about Microsoft today, how do we take the best of what Microsoft does with Azure? How do we take the best of what we do? And then we centralize it that in together, right? So we do some organizational things but when we stay focused on customer outcome, it stays pretty clean. Yeah, I think that makes total sense and we actually had Jeremy on a little bit earlier and what I think one of his things that he says that he loves is when people say, hey, what happens when I call you, can I get to Red Hat and they call Red Hat, they can get to Microsoft and I think that's a key. I'm sure, is that a key across all of these joint solutions and joint go to market that you have? Yeah, having clarity of how those co-created solutions are going to be treated today, what is their long-term lifespan look like? Who's going to support it? Who answers the phone when you call if you need help? Having clarity around that from day one is really essential. One of the things that we're announcing here at Summit as well is a ecosystem solution catalog and that is a, we're centralizing sort of a repository searchable by customers, searchable by partners. It takes co-created solutions that we've done with partners and puts them in one spot so they can be found. Whether or not it's a customer trying to tackle something new, whether or not it's a partner who will take that to go to market, but to your point, Rob, there's a list of criteria that need to be met in order to be listed in that catalog. One is what is the long-term collaboration that we will have with those partners and our commitment to make sure that we will have a long-term kind of support model, technology roadmap. You have to do that from day one in order to make sure that our goal with partners is to deliver innovation and products and solutions that folks can trust and so you need to do that from day one. And I think it's neat how, again, you guys are in a unique, I mean, open source is one, right? I mean, we've been saying that for weeks. Myself and John were at open source Summit a couple of weeks ago and then KubeCon and CloudNativeFest before that and when you start to look at it, open has won the day and I think what you bring to that is being the largest open source company is really unique in the fact that you're bringing open source everywhere and I think that Apex in Kolo or on-premise as well as you have Roa, Rossa, I always messed up which is funny because I was at AWS so I should be able to pronounce that but and then you have Aero with Azure. I think is this what you're helping other people in the ecosystem understand is the right fit at the right time of the right solution? That is the basis of what Open Hybrid Cloud is all about, right? To me, the real strength of Open Hybrid Cloud is that it's tailored to any customer for where they are on their journey and what they need to do. Whether or not they want to use a managed service, right? So they have decided that they want someone else to have an SRE team to keep that up and running all the time. We do the back end work with Azure or with AWS to create Aero and Rossa respectively if that's what the customer chooses to do. If they want to consume RHEL or Ansible or OpenShift from the marketplace because they have a procurement arrangement or relationship with a Azure or with an AWS they can procure it that way. And we're really interested in how we then build upon that with how does the ISV then leverage that? How does a distributor through the programs they have with AWS? To me, it's we take what we do in the open source communities which is all about collaboration, right? In that open source community. Our goal is to take that same motion and bring it into the ecosystem. It's about how do we catalyze the connections between partners because in this day and age we're a platform company. We know what we do. We know what we don't do. We work with the platform to provide that consistent base and then we work with partners to add all the capabilities whether it be different architectures, right? Which was talked about on stage today could be Intel could be ARM, right? Could be multiple chip architectures to the HPEs and the Dells of the world. You mentioned the Apex announcement we did with Dell up to the applications with AI and things, right? It's all about choice. And our goal is to be where the customer wants it how they want it to be able to procure it how they want it. The some of the big cloud providers have been reluctant to buy into multi-cloud in particular but into open platforms, open cloud platforms. Are you seeing those attitudes change? What I'm seeing is customers are really making decisions. I would say predominantly there's a couple of trends that I would say that I'm hearing from customers. One is they're making procurement decisions by going in with things like committed spend with some key hyperscalers that's guiding some decisions. One thing I am seeing probably the strongest is that hybrid cloud is getting much more intentional and honestly in many cases it's workload driven. They will pick a set or a type of workload and they'll pick the large hyperscaler that they take that workload to and they may pick a different set of workloads or applications that they take to a different cloud. I do think that the world is moving into more multi-cloud to I think all of the hyperscalers are doing their best to attract workloads. It's all about workloads at the end of the day, right? But what I'm seeing as reality is that most of the intentional choices around the public clouds are being done workload by workload. And when you're in your role when you talk about ecosystems it's not just the cloud providers. It's not just the hardware providers. Help people understand what you mean by ecosystems. Yeah, this is great. We did a big shift at Red Hat a little over a year ago to really centralize all of our ecosystem work into one team. It's allowed us to do a lot more co-creation and multi-partner solutioning than we were able to do before. Just it helped from an organizational standpoint and we pulled together teams from all over the globe so it gives us a global reach. We cover everything from the hardware partners down to the chip level, right? Clearly AI and work with, we do with NVIDIA. Architecture matters in some of these key spaces. So we do hardware partners. We do our OEM partners. We cover cloud partners as well and it's not just the hyperscalers, right? We're seeing things like sovereign cloud in Europe really drive the importance of regional cloud providers and managed service providers around cloud deployments. In addition to that, we have service providers and systems integrators. We also cover ISVs and software partners and we've had some great announcements with some big market makers like SAP. We had an announcement in Q1 and then of course we have distribution and channel. We have all of those partner types now that we cover in the organization and really where the opportunity that excites me is when we make those connections between the two, right? How are we building something with a hyperscaler that brings value to an ISV? That's really where I consider the magic of the ecosystem happens. I'm curious about your hardware partnerships and you mentioned that Dell announced, I think just today, the Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, certainly a feather in your cap but this is, what is that process like of working with a company like Dell which is focused on boxes? Yeah, we have had a longstanding partnership with Dell for many years and as they have, we've seen Dell evolve their strategy as the market has evolved with things like the addition of Apex. In fairness, it all starts with customer demand and customer ask. We look at hybrid cloud holistically. We proactively, in fact, I just left our customer meeting right where we had a set of about 60 customers in a room. We asked them, who are the partners that matter to you? What is the capability you want in your hybrid cloud? Things like Apex, which bring that in their data center, simple to deploy, unified management. If that's of importance to our customers, we have a longstanding relationship we can build upon. The strategy of Dell and Red Hat has been aligned for a long time and how we bring that. So, and quite honestly, it comes down to engineers rolling up their sleeves side by side together. That's where it happens. Our goal is to make it simple when a customer deploys it, but there's a lot of work in the back end between our engineers that goes into making that happen and I'll be on the stage with Todd Pavone tomorrow. Our teams have been working side by side for months and months. We have to be sure that we have the work done so that customers can really be confident when we bring it out to market. How do you work with companies that have their own proprietary products and want to build and have that proprietary mindset? How do you work with them while maintaining that openness and maintaining the fact that your software ultimately must be released as open source? Yeah. I was chatting with someone earlier about this. I think to your point Rob, open source has won, right? It's made an incredible difference in the market. All of the AI stuff that we talked about on stage and how fast that is, it's built upon the rapid pace of innovation and open source. But I also think to your point, Paul, the side by side coexistence of proprietary and open source has come to a much more integrated level, I would say. Companies are making choices, what they will do open source and what they will do proprietary. Those two will live side by side. We at Red Hat are committed to open source. Every bit of code we deliver will be open source. We're very clear about that, right? That is core to who we are. Other companies will make choices based upon their business model of what they do. The good thing about open source is that it integrates well, right? With those open connection points to other technologies. We do things in the upstream, whether it be, I'll take Rell as an example, whether it be in Fedora or CentOS Stream. Companies who are doing proprietary work can get early access. They can start to do that integration work, right? And we've seen those two things, I think, will exist forever, right? We did the big announcement with SAP and Q1, right? Clearly, that's them taking, they're very strong enterprise world and workloads. They're running on Rell and they've made a commitment right now around Rell. We bring those two worlds together. I think the side by side coexistence of those two things has gotten a lot stronger over the years and the development model around open source, allowing for that connection, early development upstream, kind of makes that easier for them. One of the things that you just made me think about which was very interesting was customers, the ecosystem and what they need. And we had Aaron Boyd on just before and we were talking about some of the futures and where the ideas come into her group to start building yet and one of them was backstage and the work that's being done there is that I want that cloud-like, hyperscalar-like experience, but with my open shift. How do you balance that with when you're talking to, because you are working with the hyperscalars and they have their management platforms and the integrations into that, how do you balance those two out, I guess is a question I had. I think first we start out with choice. There's always going to be things that a customer can choose. They can choose this direction or that direction. Our goal is to make sure that we make it available to them, quite honestly. We'll continue to strive to get more open source into the hands of customers, because that's what they do. Backstage is hugely powerful and us being able to bring that on to develop, hugely powerful. There will always be other tools. There's so many things now that is driving customer decisions. Our goal is to provide them the optionality and the long-term optionality to do that, whether or not they choose to do it with a collaboration with a partner, or whether or not they choose to do it with open source. Our goal is to make it all available and easy to consume. It's just good to have options, right? Right, and I would assume that you're also working with the ecosystem partners as customers as well, driving into like Aaron and that organization, the CTO's office, is that how some, you have direct lines into that as well? Yeah, absolutely. I think in many cases, right, as customers, partners, it somewhat gets blended, right? It becomes a relationship between what they need in order to consume and in order to deploy and what they need in order to bring to their customers. And in some cases, it's really important to have that together. I just touched back on the SAP announcement. One part of that announcement was their migration of internal usage onto RHEL. The other part of that was their commitment that new deployments have rise, right, would be preferred onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The more they use it internal, gives them more confidence to bring that out to their customers for things like that type of a service. So I do think in those spaces, it becomes a combination, right? They build up confidence in the usage that they have, so there's a customer-vendor relationship there, but it does serve as a sort of confidence base as they bring that out to customers as well. It's the new oil of the tech ecosystem. It absolutely is. Stephanie, Jeff, Stephanie Chiris, thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. We'll be looking forward to how your partnerships progress and what you have to announce tomorrow. Yeah, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it. We'll be right back from Red Hat Summit 2023. Paul Gillum with Rob Stretch A. You're watching theCUBE.