 Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at Red Hat Summit, Boston, Massachusetts. Two days of wall-to-wall coverage rounding down day one. I'm John Furrier, your host of Rob Stretcher Analyst here. Breaking it all down, we've got two great guests talking about cloud and open ecosystems. Prabhakarapana, who's a Senior Vice President of HCL Tech, the AWS business unit. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to see you. Colin Fisher with Red Hat Senior Director, Worldwide Partner Ecosystem. Thanks for coming on. You're welcome, thank you. So, you guys together partnering, a lot of cloud deals going on. Obviously, cloud, great presence in AWS as well. We've got a product there. What's the big cloud trend right now that you guys are seeing? What we're hearing on theCUBE is there's a lot of right sizing. Obviously, a little bit of headwind on the cloud, public cloud side. Europe's looking good. It's good to tend as at KubeCon. What's the major trends in cloud right now that you guys are seeing right now for customers? Is it a slowdown? Is it accelerating? What are some of the core things you're seeing? You want to take it? Yeah, so from a market perspective, if you look at where the clients are focusing on are hybrid and multi-cloud, right? So, the hybrid and multi-cloud is definitely a big trend. That's one aspect of it. Second is towards people are pushing more on hyper automation, AI, and ML related aspects. It's another important trend. Third is edge computing. So, and another important aspect of, how do you look at computing aspects of the cloud is concerned. So, if you look at hybrid and multi-cloud, that has become one of the key conversation with the CIOs and CDIOs, which actually potentially utilizes your hybrid infrastructure and as well as public cloud services, plus a multi-cloud strategy. And with partners like Red Hat OpenShift, it becomes imminent for the client conversations in terms of positioning in a more cost-effective manner. So, we see these three are key essential aspect of it in terms of a public cloud and as well as a private cloud partnership as we move forward. Talk about the relationship with Red Hat, history, what's the current status? What are you guys working on? What are some of the successes? Quick, give a quick overview of the relationship. Awesome, I mean, we have got a long history in terms of our partnership. Specifically from an HCL Tech perspective, you see we are an ecosystem within HCL Tech. Which is like end-to-end stack managing the ecosystems. And we also have an IBM and Red Hat ecosystem within the HCL Tech. Obviously, this partnership is not that old enough, but the level of conversations we have been partnering and having are extensive. If you look at the financial services industry, healthcare segment, manufacturing, we have some key conversations going on on the ground, wherever we are looking at a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure services. So, there are some industry specific solutions that we are building as well as we move forward, which kind of addresses some of the concerns the client has caught in those specific industries. So, which is the right combination in terms of positioning this in front of the clients for us. Yeah, and does it go beyond ROSA and OpenShift on AWS, or how does it really, how do you utilize Red Hat or work with Red Hat in that way? There are various aspects, right? So, when a client looks at the combination of an hyperscaler, cloud provider, and an OpenShift, it definitely goes beyond the ROSA, right? It is one of the enabling factor which actually clinches clients to actually enable and do drive those conversations internally. It is about the strategy that you're going to put in place and for each of those clients as to what will work and what doesn't work. If you look at AIML aspects of it, there is a combination of OpenShift, ROSA, and the elements that we use. And from an AWS perspective, if you look at the SageMaker, RaceMaker kind of aspects, you combine that for an efficient use in the market. Similarly, it is security, it is compliance, it is data governance aspects of it. We look at it more from a 360 degree point of view rather than just looking at that as a ROSA aspect alone. ROSA is definitely a channel of conversations that we do, but there are holistic elements that we discuss with our clients in terms of our partnership and what works better for the clients. Yeah, and we've also had a lot of conversations, Prabhakar, about CentOS migrations, right? Because that's one of the things that's due to happen. There's a migration for customers, we're looking at rail six to rail seven, CentOS migrations, there's kind of the stars are aligning a little bit and HCL in a great position to start helping customers with that. And then the SAP piece is very relevant actually in the cloud. So we have lots of conversations around SAP. I got to ask first of all, I love to hear what you guys are doing, you have your own stack, you got to build out your own middleware, I guess it's a bad word to say, I mean, you know, it's software. And that's something that we call super cloud. We've been given a lot of evidence for about, I was 20, 21 at re-invent, we saw that trend and I actually pressed Adam Sileski at AWS prior to re-invent and wrote a story about it called NextGen Cloud. He didn't like the word NextGen Cloud, but I liked it, it sounded like Stats, NextGen Stats on TV. But the trend was is that people were building on top of AWS, that didn't have to spend any cap X, and would get cloud like capabilities. Okay, you could call that an ISV, but ecosystems were developing. And so I was calling out the conversation just to start out saying, hey, if you have an ecosystem, are you really just an ISV? Are you selling a package? So this new trend of you get on top of AWS service on that part of the cloud and then give the customers a choice to connect fabric, whether it's like a data layer or some area that's differentiated to their company. Snowflake, for example, does this. Databricks is doing this. They go multi-cloud. How do you guys see that? Because you're providing services to your customers. What does that look like? Take us through that. Am I a little bit off, what's your reaction? And then how does that play out? Got a big doubt? Well, okay, so let me just take a step back if you like. I think the conversation around what's happening with the hyperscalers is very relevant in the marketplace. Truthfully, they're becoming more and more powerful. They have more and more reach into the market. But I think the important part here is how did hyperscalers leverage the ecosystems? Because it's important for Red Hat as a hyperscanner partner, but also HCL and many other partners, to be honest, to be able to leverage those platforms, leverage those footprints, because not everybody's in the market for plumbing their own infrastructure to take a quote that everybody uses. But then it's then about, how do you then add the value add on top? And actually, if you're a partner today and you're just reselling the platforms, truthfully, that's a pretty tough existence. It's about the value add that you add on top. It's about the services that you can add on top of those layers. And we have many partners today that are adding that incremental value on top of the AWS and also the Red Hat platforms as well. So, and I know our friends at HCL are doing that as well. Yeah, and that's where the value is. That's where the, I won't say customization, but the value creation is leveraging the cloud scale. Now, Amazon, they compete with other clouds. They're not going to be endorsing multi-cloud, but they want to, and Andy, I pressed Andy Jassy on this before he took the CEO job. And he said, look, we wouldn't want to be the best cloud, so competition's healthy in the cloud players, but customers will want to stitch stuff together. No, absolutely. I mean, if you look at, see, that the role of system integrator and a cloud provider and partners is very, very important in the current setup, right? So, each provider brings his own strengths and weaknesses in terms of where we need to head. Where the system integrator role starts and expands is in terms of identifying the gap that the client has, beat an industry, beat a solution, beat a framework, and build on top of that, those services, bring in the right partners together and provide a holistic solution. That's the strategy that you need to put in place from an organizational success point. And that's where AI is fueling the apps and low-end of the stack. We've been talking about this for weeks. Yeah, I think what's interesting in, I think, when you look at what customers are asking, how important is Red Hat being open source to your customers? How important is, how often does that come up as a reason for them going this direction? Let me take that, because he's anyway a part of Red Hat. So, I'm biased. I know what he's going to say. You know what he's going to say, right? So, let me take a spin. He's not going to say no. I mean, it's quite important. Just, in general, we ask, every client has, now, if you look at 60, 70% of the client has chosen more than one cloud provider. See, what happens is when you have a multi-cloud strategy, it becomes imminent in terms of having the right open-ship level of conversations within the landscape. Because you're not vendor-locking in. You are exploring the best features of both the cloud strategies or a multi-cloud element. You're looking more from a cost-efficient perspective and bringing the right level of skills and capabilities into the setup. So, from a client perspective, I think it is more of a system integrator as well to explain the pros and cons of having a cloud versus a multi-cloud and as well as combining with the open-ship conversations. It's more about articulating, that's where the role of HCL Tech comes in. If you look at, we have a strategy called Cloud Smart where we position and go with a strategic vision for each of those clients. Every client is different. Every client need is different. So, we construct and build a story for each of that client bringing in the right strategy, right element, right operating model underpinned by the security, risk governance and combining this with the hyperscaler like AWS and the Red Hat open-ship and then provide that value-added framework for the client. So, that's very important as a system integrator. And more often we see clients liking that because you're making it much more transparent conversations to the client and making it much more viable for the client as to giving those pros and cons of having the right architecture in place. And I strongly believe that, that's a right model to go ahead and we see more and more clients adopting. I think that's a great point. If you go back to the history of open-shift, remember there was a point where they were in a state from the open stack side and then they were staring down the barrel of Kubernetes just hitting the scene and Red Hat did a great job. I'm going to talk to Paul Comrie about this. They completely shifted and went all in on hybrid. And I think that was such a smart move. But if you're talking about edge on-premises and cloud working together and you're stitching things together, that's distributed computing. You need to have a common operating layer that's got to be consistent. You call cloud smart good name. It's a smart play. It's the architectural thing as well as it is practical. What's your reaction to that? Well, and so actually I agree, 110%. But I think actually when you start to look at edge in AI and all the different technologies that are coming to the forefront now, that smart cloud, that homogenous platform right across those different environments is critically important moving forward, right? In fact, how are you going to do what you want to do if you don't have that ability to manage across those hybrid multi-cloud environments? Do you think it's multi-cloud or multi-environment? Is there a distinction? It's no nuanced question, but, I mean, Azure to Azure, they got their stack. I get that, but like edge is a different animal, but is it stack dependent? How do you tease that out? We sometimes call it multi-environment. Edge, premise, cloud, that's cloud operations. Now you've got different stacks. How do you guys look at that? To clear up the confusion. I mean, we look at it as today at Red Hat, we look at that as multi-cloud, right? I guess you could say it's about terminology and nuances, but actually when we look at it, we look at it from a multi-cloud perspective. We are an organization that proud ourselves on having that multi-cloud footprint so that it kind of gives customers the flexibility, the choice, and all the usual stuff you've heard time and time again. But actually, that is real value to our customers, right? That's what our customers are asking for today. That's allowing customers to take the technology, distribute it, use it where they want to use it. But more importantly as well, when you start to then wrap around some of the buying programs that we've brought into the organization recently, it's giving customers real flexibility and choice, and then how they start to get better economies of scale or driving better kind of margins, if you like, out of their cloud footprints. And that's what customers want to go. What's your take? I mean, I agree with Colin, but in terms of the multi-cloud and multi-environment, in a cloud you can have a multiple-environment setup as well, seeing each of those, every cloud, the cloud is a strategy. Multi-cloud is a couple of clouds, multiple clouds. But the environment could be complex. Environment could have multiple environments as a, for example, if you look at from an IoT perspective, IoT devices are one set of segments. If you look at from a smart city perspective, right? If you look at the manufacturing industry, there are various other aspects which needs to be connected to the system. So each of these environment changes from time to time, right? So there will be a complex multi-environment system for a multi-cloud conversations. It is more about bringing the right elements and ingredients onto the table to make sure you create a holistic environment and strategy which works for the client. I think what's interesting is you've both kind of mentioned it a couple of times around AI. And I think that when some of the conversations we've been having at the last couple of shows is that there is a real sustainability issue with generative AI and potentially, you know, that's solved by smaller models or inference or what have you longer term. But how are you counseling customers to look at cloud, look at AI? Because to me, it can't all be in the cloud because A, there won't be enough GPUs. You won't be able to cost effectively use to really train your models long-term. What are you seeing from your customers right now? I mean, the AI has been the talk of the town in recent times, right? So everybody's talking about AI, you know, Google, Microsoft, AWS. People's grandmothers are talking about AI. It's magic. It's something, but from a client perspective, what matters is, you know, I'm talking about a recent experience with the CIO. He said, you know, it doesn't matter whether it is AI or ML or any other aspect, but what is very much important for me is in hyper automation. I'm looking at an automation. So every client has a different perspective of looking at it, right? So some clients look at more from a cost efficiency perspective consolidation. Some healthcare clients look at more from a AI modeling perspective. The task can be done in a multimodal, you know, way. Today, Matt's session in the keynote he spoke about Red Hat OpenShift AI, which is another amazing dimension, you know, which is going to be built on the OpenShift, which is to be launched. I mean, that's an amazing feature. So it's more about creating the right environment for that specific client to build that specific AI model. I mean, there are costs associated with it, but it's more about as we get mature, I think things will also get matured on the AI domain is what we strongly believe. Prep, thank you guys so much for coming on. I will give you the last words, both of you, to share this wave that we're on. And we all believe, I mean, I believe that this AI is going to be one of the big three inflection points. Matt kind of threw in the iPhone in there, but I think iPhone came out of the web and I think cloud came out of the web SaaS market, but PC, web, AI, if this is truly the next wave, the companies that lean into it and take advantage of it are ready, they got to be data ready, they got to be AI ready with the mindset, the ones that aren't going to get washed away, right? So they'll be losers and winners and losers. What's your advice to companies out there who are obviously it's in their face? Yeah, it's hyped up, but there is an element of refactor and don't let someone come in and eat your lunch. The ones that do it right will win. What's your vision and advice to folks to? My advice or two cents on this is you need to be prepared, right? Technology keeps changing. AI is today, we are talking about AI, but you need to look at from each of your domain and industry perspective what works for you. In some industry's cases, some people will think, okay, I would wait for some time to get adopted, let the technology get matured for me to adopt. There are some startups who are actually latching onto it in terms of creating their own marketable model. So it depends upon the type of company you work for, but this is a space to watch, build your skills around it, understand what's happening on the perspective so that you are well positioned to adopt at the right time. I interviewed Swami when they announced the hugging face and expanded relationship. That was, I think, a couple of weeks before they did the big Genevieve AI launch. As a response to the other cloud and open AI. And it's interesting, now they're all in. Adam Sileski, the whole team, partner network, all plugging Genei, because that's where the action is. And developers are submitting papers and you're seeing more intellectual, real meat on the bone work. Not just hype, but startups are working on it, people are jamming hard on it. Solving these hard problems now with AI to assist the human. Yeah, absolutely. And truthfully, I don't think it's going to slow down. We all know that that's the way the marketplace is going. It reminds me a little bit of virtualization and where we were with cloud, kind of seven or eight years ago. That mass is starting to happen. The wave is really picking up. And we all know, of course, once organized, that customers go and are interested, organizations then push their money and their research into it. And of course, it then snowballs. But I think one of the things that we all need to think about is, well, it's a data sovereignty piece with AI. And I think that's going to become very important as we move forward, right? Given as well some of the geopolitical considerations that we've had recently. So again, AI, great technology, but we all just need to think about the data sovereignty. Dave Vellante's interviewing Michael Dell today. I just saw the interview. And Michael Dell was an interesting, he started his company in dorm room when he was 19. He was doing mail order PCs. Remember, mail was the technology for shipping stuff. So he jumps on the web, does bill to order, manages supply chain, Dell computer rode that wave. Although he was somewhat a company, he was an upstart. All direct mail's gone, now you got the web. So these are the things that are going to happen. And companies are smart CEOs are saying, whoa, who do we call? Correct. We call our friends at CIO. What would you say to that CIOs? Hey, I need help. What's the pitch? On the AI? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's more about context, right? So what context the client is looking at and what problem the client is trying to resolve, right? So I mean, from a system integrator perspective, it's all the skill set that we need to be ready. So we are ready in terms of addressing some of those concerns for various clients. So as we build the capability, as the technology gets even more mature, I think more and more those demands will come where we need to address them accordingly. So we are well positioned in that way with our cloud mass strategy and as well as the investments that we are currently making in this technology internally as well, will definitely ensure our skills and capabilities are rightly positioned for each of those clients. And HCL has a cloud, which is great. You got a stack adding value. Guys, thanks for coming on, Colin. You're very welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot. All right, day one, we got one more interview then we're going to do the wrap up. Two days, wall-to-wall cover. Go to siliconangle.com, check out the stories that are hitting of course day. Right here, we have a great panel coming up next. We'll be right back.