 We're back at the sea port in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillan. Tracy Zenty is here. He's the director of Global Partner Management at Microsoft and Tom Anderson as the vice president of Ansible at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you. Ansible on Azure. We're going to talk about that. Why do I need Ansible? Why do I need that kind of automation in Azure? What's the problem you're solving there? Yeah, so automation itself is connecting customer's infrastructure to their end resources. So whether that infrastructure's in the cloud, whether it's in the data center or whether it's at the edge, Ansible is the common automation platform that allows customers to reuse automation across all of those platforms. And so Tracy, I mean, Microsoft does everything. Why do you need Red Hat to do that? We want that automation, right? We want our customers to have that ease of use so they can be innovative and bring their workloads to Azure. So that's exactly why we want Ansible. Yeah, so kind of loaded questions here, right? As we were talking offline, the nature of partnerships is changing. It's about co-creating, adding value together, getting those effects of momentum. But maybe talk about how the relationship started and how it's evolving. I'd love to have your perspective on the evolving nature of ecosystems. Yeah, I think the partnership with Red Hat has been strong for a number of years. I think my predecessor was in the role for five years. There was a person in there for a couple of years before that. So I think seven or eight years we've been working together. And co-engineering, you know, Red Hat and our prize Linux, it's co-engineered. Ansible was co-engineered. We work together, right? So we want it to run perfectly on our platform. We want it to be a good customer experience. I think the evolution that we're seeing is in how customers buy, right? They want us to be one company, right? They want us to be easy. They want to be able to buy their software where they run it on the cloud. They don't want to have to call Red Hat to buy and then call us to buy and then deploy. And we can do all that now with Ansible is the first one we're doing this together and we'll grow that on our marketplace so that it's easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to keep track of. This is not just Ansible in the marketplace. This is actually a fully managed service. What is the value you've added on top of that? So it runs in the customer account but it acts kind of like SaaS. So Red Hat gets to manage it, right? And it's in their own tenant. So they get to, in the customer's own tenant, right? With a service principle, Red Hat's able to do that management. Tom, you want to add anything to that? Yeah, some customers just have to worry about managing Ansible. They just worry about using Ansible to automate their infrastructure. So it's kind of a win-win situation for us and for our customers. We manage their infrastructure form in the customer's resources themselves and they get to just focus on automating their business. Now if they want to do cross-cloud automation or automation to their hybrid cloud, we support that as well. 100%. Absolutely. We're totally fine with that, right? I mean, it's unrealistic to think customers run everything in one place. That is an enterprise. That's not reality. So yeah, we're fine with that. That's not every cloud provider. No. Has that posture. That's true. You guys have, you know, Amazon can't even say multi-cloud and they get thrown off the stage. Of course we'd love it to all run on Azure but we want our customers to be happy and have choice. Yeah. You guys have all, you've been around a long time. So you had a huge on-prem estate, brought that to the cloud and Azure Stack. I mean, it's been around forever and it's evolved. So you've always believed in whatever you call it, hybrid IT and of course that's you guys, that's your mission. Yeah, it's hybrid IT. So how do you each see hybrid? Where's the points of agreement? Sounds like there's more overlap than gaps but maybe you could talk about your- Yeah, I don't think there are any points of disagreement. I think for us it's meeting our customers where their center of gravity is, where they see their center of management gravity. If it's on Azure, great. If it's on their data center, that's okay too. So they can manage to or from. So if Azure is their center of gravity, they can use automation, national automation to manage all the things on Azure, things on other cloud providers, things in their data center, all the way out to their edge. So they have the choice of what makes the most sense to them. And Azure Arc is obviously, that's how Azure Stack is evolving, right? Yeah, and we have Azure Arc integration with Ansible. So yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we also have RHEL on our marketplace, right? So you can buy the basement and you can buy the roof, hit everything in between. So we're growing the estate on marketplace as well to all the other products that we have in common. So, absolutely. How much of an opportunity does this go if we go inside, give us a little peek inside Microsoft? How much of an opportunity does Microsoft think about multi-cloud specifically? I'm not crazy about the term multi-cloud because to me multi-cloud is that runs in Azure, runs in AWS, runs at Google, maybe runs somewhere else. But multi-cloud meaning that common experience, your version of hybrid, if you will, is how serious is Microsoft about that as a business opportunity? A lot of people would say, well, Microsoft really doesn't want, they want everything in their cloud. But I'd like to hear from you. Well, we have Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a Microsoft branded version of OpenShift. We have Ansible now on our marketplace. We also, of course, we have AKS. So, I mean, container strategy runs anywhere. So, but we also obviously have services that enhance all these things. So I think, our marketplace is a third-party marketplace. It is designed to let customers buy and run easily on Azure and we'd want to make that experience good. So I don't know that it's, I can speak to our strategy on multi-cloud, but what I can speak to is when businesses need to do innovation, we want it to be easy to do that, right? We want it to be easy to buy, to find, buy, deploy, manage, and that's what we're trying to accomplish. I'm sure you're not trying to stop it. No, yeah. Whether or not it involves into something that you heavily lean into, we'll see. When we were talking before the cameras turned on, you mentioned, you said that you think marketplaces are the future. How, why do you say that? And how will marketplaces be differentiated from each other in the future? Well, our marketplace is really, first of all I think, you know, as you said off camera, like, they're happy, they're now, you can buy now, right? There's nothing that stops you, but to me it's an extension of consumerization of IT. I've been in IT and manageability for about 23 years. And, you know, full automation is what we in IT used to always talk about that single pane of glass. How do you keep track of everything? How do you make it easy? How do you support, and, you know, IT's always eking out that last little bit of funding to do innovation, right? So what we can do with consumerization of IT is make it easier to innovate, make it cheaper to innovate, right? So I think marketplaces do that, right? They've got gold images you can deploy. You've also able to deploy custom images. So I think the future is, as particularly with ours, like we support, I don't remember the exact number, but over 100 countries of tax calculation. We've got like 17 currencies. So as we progress, and customers can run from anywhere in the world and buy from anywhere in the world and make it simple to do those things that used to take maybe two months to spin up services for innovation, and Ansible helps with that, that's going to help enterprises innovate faster. And I think that's what marketplaces are really going to bring to the forefront is that innovation. Tom, why did Ansible, I'm going to say one. They never done. But it was unclear a few years ago, like which automation platform was going to win in the marketplace. And clearly Ansible has taken a leading position. Why? What were the factors that led to that? Honestly, it was the strength of the community, right? And Red had the leading into that community to support that community. When you look out at the upstream community for Ansible and the number of participants, active participants that are contributing to the community just increases its value to everybody. So the number of integrations, the number of things that you can automate with Ansible is in the thousands and thousands. And that's not because a group of Red Hat engineers wrote it, that's because our community partners, like Microsoft or the Azure integration for Ansible, F5 does theirs. Customers take those and expand on them. So the number of use cases that we can address through the community and through our partners is immense. But that doesn't just happen. I mean, what have you done to cultivate that community? Well, it's in Red Hat's DNA, right? To be the catalyst in a community to bring partners and users together to share their knowledge and their expertise and their skills and to make the code open so anybody can go grab Ansible from upstream and start doing stuff with it if they want. If they want to mature on it and management for it and support in all the other things that Red Hat provides, then they come to us for a subscription. So it's really been about sort of catalyzing and supporting that community. And Red Hat is a good steward of these upstream communities. Is Microsoft, is Azure putting Ansible to use actually within your own platform as opposed to being a managed service? Or are you adopting Ansible for automation of the Azure platform? I'll let you answer that. So two years ago, Microsoft presented at Ansible Fest, our full conference, Art Warak. I'm butchering his last name. But he came on and told how the networking team at Microsoft support about 35,000 access points across hundreds of buildings, all the Microsoft campuses using Ansible to do that. Fantastic story. If you want to go on YouTube and look up that use case. So Microsoft is an avid user of the Ansible technology in their environment. Azure is kind of this really, I mean, incredible strategic platform for Microsoft. I wonder if you could talk about Azure as a honeypot for partners. I mean, it seems, I mean, the momentum is unbelievable. I mean, I pay attention to the earnings calls, every quarter of Azure growth, even though I don't know what the exact number is because they won't give it to me, but they give me the growth rates. It's actually accelerating. I've got my number now, it's in the tens of billions. I mean, I'm north of 35 billion, but growing at the high 30%, I mean, it's remarkable. So talk about the importance of that to the ecosystem. Well, Satya said it right many times, partners are central to our strategy. But if you think about it, software solves problems. We have software that solves problems. They have software that solves problems. So when IT and customers are thinking of solving a problem, they're thinking software, right? And we want that software to run on Azure, so partners have to be central to our strategy. Absolutely, it's, again, we're one team to the customer. They want to see that as working together seamlessly. They don't want it to be hardware Azure plus software. That's absolutely critical to our success. And if I could add, for us, the partners are super important. So some of our launch partners are like F5 and CyberR who have certified Ansible content. For Ansible on Azure, we have service provider partners like Accenture and Kindrel that are launching with us and providing our joint customers with help to get up to speed. So it really is a partner play. Absolutely. Where are you guys taking this? Where do you want to see it go? What are some of the things that observers should pay attention to as markers of success and evolution? Well, certainly for us, it's obviously customer adoption, but it is providing them with patterns, so out of the box patterns that makes it easy for them to get up and running and solve the use cases and problems that they run into most frequently, or problems aren't the right word, challenges, opportunities on Azure to be able to automate the thing. So we're really leaning into the different use cases, whether it's Edge, whether it's Cloud, whether it's Cloud to Edge, all of those things we want to provide users with out of the box Ansible content that allows them to just get up and automating super fast. And doing that on Azure makes it way easier for us because we don't have to focus on the install and the setting up and configuring it. It's all just part of the experience. And Tracy, for Microsoft, it's world domination with a smile. Whoa. Of course. No, I know, of course not. No, I think it's, you know, I think it's to continue to grow the co-engineering we do across all of the Red Hat products. We've, I can't even tell you the number of things we work on together, but to look forward strategically at what opportunities we have across our products in there is to integrate like Arc and Ansible. And then making it all easy to buy and making it available so that every, you know, customers have choice and they can buy how they want to and simplify. So we're just going to continue to do that. And, you know, we're at that infancy right now. And as we grow, it'll just get easier and easier with more and more products. Well, bringing the Edge into the equation is going to be really interesting. Microsoft, with its gaming, you know, Vector is amazing in recent, you know, awesome acquisitions. All the gamers are excited about that. And that's a huge Edge play. You'll have to bring my son on for that interview. Yeah. My son will interview. He knows more than all of us. What about Ansible? What's ahead for Ansible? Edge. So part of the Red Hat play at the Edge. We're getting a lot of customer pull for both industrial Edge use cases in the energy sector. We've had a joint customer with Azure that's has a combined Edge platform. Certainly the cloud stuff that we're announcing today is a huge growth area. And then just general enterprise automation. There's lots of room to run there, for instance. And lots of industries, right? Telco, manufacturing. Retail. Retail. Yeah. There's so many places to go. Yeah. They need the help. The market's just, I don't know how you're going to count it anymore. It's just enormous. Yeah. It's the entire GDP of the world. Guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great story. Congratulations on the partnership and the announcements. And look forward to speaking with you in the future. Yeah. Thanks for having us. You're very welcome. But keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillen. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll be right back at the Seaport in Boston.