 theCUBE alumni, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, I'm John Troyer, co-founder of Tech Reckoning, and our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President and General Manager of the Management and Business Unit of Red Hat, home of Ansible, among other great capabilities. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for stopping by. Red Hat Summit 2018's happening, all the buzz is all about Kubernetes, containers, obviously Linux, and all the action, really transforming the digital journey of customers. It means cloud scale, check data, check new applications, check a lot of interesting things. Now Kubernetes, workload, multicloud, all kind of coming together. What's going on for you guys in this show? Because obviously management, operations, automation, these are all things that are data driven, your thoughts. Yeah, so I'm responsible for management and automation, and so all these technologies that you're hearing about, Red Hat is helping people digitally transform, so a lot of the technologies you mentioned, it turns out that these environments really require automation to move fast, and management's essential to keep these really complex environments up and running and secure, which is a big issue for people. IT operations has been around for a while, but it's always been like, okay, managing the data center, but now you've got a lot of things going on. Management, operations, and data is changing the world because now you can apply automation to it. What's a customer to do here? Because a lot of people are recasting, and I won't say re-platformizing, but they're definitely looking at a global cloud native with containers, legacy taken care of. How do I instrument this? What is the approach that you guys see customers taking from Red Hat's perspective? Well, there's a couple of principles. Automation is huge, and it's interesting because automation on the front edge, getting the containers and cloud services, automation's huge, but we also see automation for people to reduce the burden of their legacy environments by using automation to free up resources and people and money that they can put into their front end digital transformation activities. The other thing besides automation that we're driving is analytics based operations because these environments, once you build them and start operating them, get very complex, very fast. So it's beyond somebody sitting in front of a network console waiting for red lights to come up on the dashboard and reacting. It really has to be automated and they have to get a lot of insights into what's going on. It's an interesting challenge. I want to get into the hybrid cloud for a second because before we get into hybrid cloud challenges, automation is a double-edged sword. You can automate something, and then all of a sudden it could have a memory leak and you don't even know about it because it's self-healing. There's a lot of automation going on. So the analytics have to be smarter. This is why we've been hearing this come up a lot which is, okay, I need visibility not just into what's happening, what's breaking, but what's going on beyond the automation. These are new dynamics. What's the approach there? How are you guys looking at that trend? Is there any products out there? Solve this challenge? So we've had a product in a portfolio. It's Red Hat Insights which is a predictive analytics based offering that we've had and basically what it does is it analyzes our customer systems and it looks across sort of a broad set of settings and processes and configurations and things and basically can actually tell them, hey, these systems are at risk. They're likely to either have performance issues or crash or they have security vulnerabilities and actually tell them what's going to happen and what they need to do. So that's called Red Hat Insights as the name implies gives you a very deep insight into your systems. We've recently tied that to automation to say this is what's wrong with your systems. Would you like us to automate and correct them or remediate them? Now I can tell you, haven't been around automation for a while, most people don't trust automation. Think about the first time you're going to get in your self-driving car and you're going to go, wait a minute, I'm going to not have a steering wheel or brake pedal or something. That's like terrifying, right? Automation in IT is the same way. It's like, wait, I'm going to have this system do what to my production systems. So there's usually this cycle where it's like show me what you're going to do with the automation, let me sort of get comfortable and verify it and then let me push the button and then automate it. That's a natural cycle. Well, let's go down one level from that and talk about hybrid cloud. So we see a lot of examples of that hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, on-prem with open stack, you know, out in the public cloud with open shift, you know, multiple clouds at once. So you've got your self-driving cloud now, one layer down, what do enterprises and IT operators need to look at from a governance and an operations perspective? What are the things they need to be worried about if they're running a multi-cloud scale operation like that? So let me use the self-driving car analogy. Let's say you bought a self-driving car from three different car manufacturers. Okay, the instrumentation, the hardware, the software's all going to be vastly different. But you're supposed to operate those things at a consistent level. So think about a hybrid cloud. All of these clouds have different instrumentation, how they get monitored and managed and the kind of events they generate, the cost models, all those things. So it's not like you can just like write a simple piece of code and say, oh, just monitor these things or just make sure they're secure or compliant. It's you have to actually instrument into each of the cloud particular instrumentation, right? And then try to automate that. So one of the things we do is we provide sort of a consistent way for people to manage what's otherwise a pretty complex, heterogeneous hybrid cloud environment. And how's that going? Can you give some anecdotal insight into how that's going? Well, it's going very well. We have a number of customers here at Summit who are talking about, you know, sort of their production journeys with Red Hat, right, transforming whether it's an open stack for private cloud or OpenShift for containers or using our middleware services or integration services and then using our management and automation to actually deploy those things, keep them secure, keep them operational and run them at scale. I mean, it's, you know, those huge success points. Joe, Ansible's been a very successful acquisition for Red Hat. What's the status of the future plans? Any updates on Ansible, its role, its relevance, and so forth. So Ansible's a great story. So Ansible was an open source, you know, company, you know, very smart people, very innovative technology, right, strong community. Red Hat acquired the company about two and a half years ago. And one of the things that we did was we didn't screw it up, right? A lot of times big companies acquire small companies and they basically crush the innovation and they kill whatever the unique, you know, thing that that company was doing. What, in this case, what we've done is because Red Hat's so good at open source so we've actually nurtured that community. We've actually helped that community grow virally, right? So the amount of contributors to the community has grown significantly. The amount of integration, you know, activities, interest in that community has grown wildly over the past two and a half years. So I think our biggest thing is we let it do what it's really good at and we've nurtured it, right? So we've taken a really smart team with some great technology and we've amplified that with the Red Hat, you know, sort of capabilities. What was that secret sauce on that? Because this is a really kind of hard thing to do. Acquisitions can get, you know, mangled a bit and founders leave and what did you guys do specifically to not screw it up? I mean, was it leave them alone, invest some tech, you mentioned nurtured community. What specifically did you guys do looking back at that? That was the secret to that success. So I, having them personally acquired three times, right, I joined Red Hat through acquisition a little over five years ago. So I've been here a while, but when I did the Ansible acquisition, I wanted to make sure that, you know, what we didn't do was break anything. So a lot of times in acquisitions, they tend to take the new company apart and they say, okay, marketing moves over to corporate marketing, engineering moves over here, product management moves over there, and they sort of take the transmission apart and then they wonder why the, you know, the engine's not running anymore, right? The car's not running anymore. And so the first thing was don't break anything. Let's understand it, let's understand how it fits in. I also think there was a good culture match, there was a good impedance match for the fact that they were smart open source guys, right, so the Red Hat way was like. They got Red Hat. Yeah, they got Red Hat. And a number of them were ex-Red Hatters. I mean, we have a lot of Red Hatters that go off and start up very interesting projects because of their background and sometimes they come home, right? And this was that kind of case. That's good, that's a great best practice, gotta say I've seen many acquisitions mangled, you know, same exactly, just go to the playbook, you know, to hear them apart. Yeah, it doesn't usually end well, you know, in large company parts, small company. So I'm curious how you all are looking at the role of the IT admin operator in this new world, this new cloud-native world we're going to. You know, the people formerly known as sysadmins, you know, I think they thought about automation a lot with maybe day zero, like setting things up, but now we've got, you know, day one and beyond. We've got to run these clouds. Does IT become full of SREs and operators or how are you dealing with your community and training them and teaching them how to work with the new environment? Yeah, so the world has gotten, you know, significantly more complicated for those folks. Right, in the good old days, you know, they were sort of segmented maybe into compute network and storage teams, and now you've got like the public cloud team and the private cloud team and the container team and the different teams, right? So the complexity's been amplified, right? What we're trying to do is we're trying to reduce that complexity by things like Ansible that basically can automate across those domains. So we introduced Ansible network automation. You can automate storage, you can automate compute, you can do stuff in private cloud, physical servers, you know, different layers with the same set of tools. That means that a person, instead of being a generalist or a specialist, can be what Gartner calls a versatile list. They can actually be good at a number of domains, right? And in this case, with a single tool set without having to learn five different, you know, tools. Joe, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for the insights. Great to hear your perspective. Final question for you. AI, machine learning, always a big part of analytics. What are you guys doing anything there? What's the update on what's coming? Because automation, you got to love machine learning and I love some of these software. You guys doing anything in particular notable you want to share that's worth highlighting. Yeah, we showed some stuff in our keynote here, you know, in terms of demos, but we're really driving towards algorithmic IT operations, right? We're going to keep applying analytics, building towards machine learning and AI for these complex environments. We have some really smart people internally, data scientists and experts. We have a lot of expertise because we're building some of these platforms and the new technologies. We have a lot of customers, they trust us, they share data with us. So we're really looking forward to advancing, you know, sort of this AI ops discipline. And the trend is your friend, the winds at your back, whatever you want to call it, you're seeing Kubernetes, you're seeing the kind of decomposition of services down to the very low granular level, throw some instrumentation on it. You now have data, data is good, right? So, you know. Speed of transformation is getting faster. Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President General Manager of the Management Business Unit here at Red Hat on theCUBE, sharing his insights here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, John Troyer. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break.