 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. And welcome back to the Red Hat Summit. We are live in the BCEC, the Boston Convention and Exposition Center, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Stephanie Chiris, who is the Vice President at GM, and Red Hat Enterprise Lennox. Stephanie. Yes. Good to see you here. Oh, nice to see you too, John. Back in Boston, right? Back in Boston, home turf. You feel at home here, I would think. I do. Big day for you, right? Relate comes out, generally available now. Big impact on the marketplace. Let's talk about that baby that you've given birth to here today. We are so excited, and having put in all the time, part of this is representing all the work the team has done and the communities have done. When you think about all the work that goes into a Lennox distribution, it is everybody. It's the communities, it's the partners. So we've released the Red Hat Enterprise Lennox 8 Beta in November, mid-November. We've had 40,000 downloads of that beta since November. People who have provided feedback and comments, suggestions, all of that fed into what we've released today as the Red Hat Enterprise Lennox 8 General Availability. So it's a big day, and part of it is we're just so proud of how we've done it, and what we've done, and we've really redefined the value of an operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Lennox 8. Yeah, I think Stu was even saying earlier, excuse me, Stu, but you were saying it was many years in the making, right? I mean, 2014, I think was the last, was when, seven. That's right, it's been five years. And so, how about the iterative process that you went through, especially through that beta stage? I'm a little interested in that, or a lot of interested in that in terms of the changes that were still made at that time, that once you heard from users and actually put it into practice. Yeah, so one of the things that part of our subscription model is getting feedback from customers. It's critical for us. And to advocate for those asks upstream, because of course everything we do is done upstream. So this is part of the way we build. I would say REL 8 was quite different in the sense that I focus all the features and functions we put into it into two buckets. We wanted to make sure that it helped customers with all the changes that have happened in the industry, help them run their business better. So things like, is it hard to find Linux skills? How did we build a web console to make that easier? Is it hard to orchestrate a data center? We put in a new capability that's a rules-based engine as a software as a service offering in every REL subscription. That takes all that we have learned in the market to how to run an efficient Linux data center. And it sends that out in a SaaS offering to every REL subscription owner, right? That helps them be more efficient. And then there's the whole set of features and functions we put in to help customers grow the business, things like container tooling. So they can take that one step into containers right from the operating system, application streams, pull in new versions. So I look at everything we've done as REL 8 really focuses on running the business better more efficiently and helping grow the business. It's a combination of those two things. And the feedback has been great, right? The REL 8 beta was great. Some tweaks, some tuning, some, I like how this is too hard. Take out the friction. That's what we were working on since November. Yeah, Stephanie, it's fascinating to me because I remember last year I sat down with the Red Hat team and they talked about just the amount of change that goes into Linux. Talk about, it's 21.6 million lines of code. Over the last two years, a third of the code base has changed. And it's something that, since it's open source, there's a lot of visibility by the community. It's been coming for years, yet something you've been working on for five years, we know how much change there's been in the industry. Can you just talk a little bit about how you balance those dynamics of the cadence of release cycle? I understand there's going to be a very systematic approach going forward as to how releases are and how Red Hat looks at things. Yeah, and one of the roles that we see that we play in the industry is sitting between all the innovation and the outlook work that's being done in the communities and the enterprise customers who need to know that they're going to run on this hardware and it's going to work and they're going to run this application and it's going to work and we serve to bridge that gap in between. We advocate for our customers upstream, we make sure that innovation is tried true and tested by the time it reaches them in RHEL and we sit in that bridge. So, to your point, we're constantly getting input from customers about things that are critical to them. Things like life cycle capabilities. Now, in an upstream community, they probably don't care about a 10-year life cycle but if you're running it on the floor of a data center, they do and we bridge that gap, feeding that back and forth and it is a bit of a balance. We need to make sure we're pulling in the next generation of things that are important but we're also protecting what's important to a customer at the enterprise level and honestly, Stu, it's a constant give and take and a constant balance but there are a few things that we hold on principle. One, it will always be upstream first. Two, it will always serve our customers in the enterprise. We do it on their behalf. So, you know, the beauty of open source is everyone can play in the three million communities that exist in all of that innovation. The challenge is everyone can play. So now, how do you take that and run your business on it? That's where we come in. So, this is why it's so important in this subscription. We constantly get that input from customers. Yeah, absolutely. When we look at this space in the cloud world, I'm kind of used to running on the latest and greatest and the platform takes care of it and as we, you know, customers stay, they're living in that hybrid and multi-cloud world and we need to bridge from the old, okay, I'm running N minus two because I haven't finished testing it yet. I want to make sure I've got the latest security. I want to make sure I take care of the latest features so I need to be able to balance both of those and it's challenging. It is challenging and to your point, balancing that is, you know, we had focused on RHEL eight because we really wanted to change the value but now moving forward, what we've heard from customers is it's a real business advantage for them to know when they're going to get a new release so they can time it with their hardware updates and their ISV updates. So, as you mentioned, as we head into RHEL eight, much more predictable life cycle. We'll have minor releases every six months, major releases every three years and, you know, as an engineer, you always say, well, I want to add this and I want to add this and then sometimes it can divert your schedule. What we've heard from our customers is, no, no, no, my schedule's really important. I need to plan, I need to predict. So now we put the schedule first, going forward, we'll put in everything we can into that version and prioritize what we can but schedule became very important to customers. So to your point, predictable life cycle is important in RHEL eight. So a huge impact in the business that way, you're giving them stability and certainty and predictability. Let's talk about the economic impact, if you will, because you did a fascinating study, your IDC did it for you, about this global economic impact that's being realized by RHEL and the figures are, they're beyond impressive. They're staggering in terms of positive economic contributions. Let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. When I think about what we all want to do every day, we all want to have impact. It's not always easy to measure impact. And so when we worked with IDC and we asked them to go off and do this study, it really was about measuring an economic impact in the world. And I was even flabbergasted at the numbers. But if you look at all the applications and the software that run on Renhead Enterprise Linux, collectively it will touch $10 trillion of business revenue this year. That's amazing. I think partly that speaks to several things. It speaks to the importance of Linux and the market and where it stands with respect to being running core business and mission critical work, what dollars and cents touch, as well as where the new applications are being written. That's the importance of Linux. I think it's also an astounding statement to say, Linux is built around an ecosystem. It's built by communities. And when you start to make that self-sustaining, that's the kind of impact that it can have. But it's incredible. Yeah, I loved, one of the customers we had already was DBS Bank and they talked about the financial industry and security and innovation and helping to become a technology company themselves. And it's not IT sitting in a silo and they had in-sourced rather than outsourced and it's the partnership with Red Hat that helps enable a lot of that transformation for a company that people don't necessarily think of, banking as that driver of technology innovation. Right, and when they looked at, when they looked at for customers, for customers who use it, just as you say, because they kind of are now technology companies, how do they look at the value of rail? Roughly, it was about a 50-50 split between savings and productivity, which feeds into savings and growth, right? New revenue being driven. So it really ties back to Linux being, yes, what we run and how do we maximize efficiency for it and yet, how do we grow our business? So it's absolutely, I mean, the use of the software that's being run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will reach economic benefits for those customers of a trillion dollars a year. That's huge, that's huge, so it's great. Yeah, so out of that 10 trillion, I don't know if you can put it in the buckets if you can, but just, or maybe the most impressive buckets, if you will, is it through efficiency, is it through time saved, is it through better, higher production? I mean, where are those big chunk gains being realized? So they provided a breakout of productivity and cost savings in the IT center and then revenue growth and honestly it's a 50-50 split between savings and growth and I think that's a huge statement, right? About not only what can be done to do cost savings because that starts to change the way, you know, everyone starts to think of a commodity as, you know, once I get into a commodity, I'm going to just save money and I'm going to pull every cent out. But when it's strategic, that's when you grow and so, you know, to me, seeing a 50% split between what I can save with it and what I can grow with it, the operating system is anything but a commodity, right? It's a complete strategic decision for a company so it was great. All right, so Stephanie would talk about economic impact, something I always love to talk about at this show is what's happening with jobs. Sixth year we've been doing this show, in the early years it was that Linux operating model is just becoming pervasive. You look at what's happening in the cloud, you look at what's happening in software to find whether it be networking or other pieces of the environment. If you understand Linux, chances are, those operating models are what they're using and the time to get up to speed on those new skills is going to be smaller. Can you talk about what you're seeing kind of the ecosystem of jobs, not just, you know, Red Hat and, you know, the customers using it but even beyond? Yeah, so we see that, I mean, the study will show that about 900,000 jobs are being driven by the rail ecosystem. That's massive, that's massive and while many of those companies are global, a lot of that is domestic. So I think that as we look at the skills group that are moving forward and you look at even the operating system adoption and the operating system adoption of Linux and those skills, customers right now are saying Linux skills are hard to find, we're working to make it easier but 900,000 jobs, that's a lot of work being driven by this ecosystem alone. Well, you said jobs or you just talked about difficulty in some respects. You know, what about, you know, educating the modern workforce or an updated workforce? I mean, what kind of impact can you have on that or do you want to have on that in terms of finding the right people in order to keep driving you forward because I think a lot of people share that concern is just coming up with that brain power, if you will, that firepower to keep this innovative cycle, to keep it rolling like it is. Where are you going for that? How are you doing that? You know, I think there's clearly things we can do in the product. We added in something called Web Console, it's built off the upstream called Cockpit but it comes in and it is, you know, you can run your Linux servers now from your phone off of a web portal and it'll be shown in a demo tomorrow morning, which is just the coolest to launch up your systems, yeah, it's great. And we worked very closely to make sure that the GUI and the feel and the way it was done was similar to Windows because many companies certainly have Windows installations, they have Linux installations. The more we can make the most of the skills that customers have and be able to have that be cross compatible is really important. And clearly we have, the market has recognized the importance of developers, not only as influencers, but developing the next applications, what will come down the pipeline and let's face it, many customers are saying, oh, I didn't know my developer was doing this but they're coming in with real, you know, growth opportunities for the business. So we have really put in a play for developers. We have developer subscriptions that they can use. So a very focused effort with our team to reach out to the developers, make sure they have the tools they need, the capabilities they need. We've put in build a Podman and Scopio right into the rel sub so that they can start to build their containers right from the OS. All right, so Stephanie, we've talked a bunch about rel 8 and I know there's tons of sessions, you're going to be in the keynote today. Yes. Give us a key nugget or two that might be overlooked if you didn't shine a light on it. Love to get your take on what you're geeking out on when it comes to rel 8. Yeah, so I'm actually one of the things in and I know you'll have a deep dive on this later. One of the things that I love about it is we have pulled in this rel 8 launch is very much to me a portfolio launch. Red Hat is a portfolio company of enterprise software. It's not a product company. We're not just an OS company, although that's important, we are a portfolio company. So what you'll see in the rel 8 announcement is really how it ties to the rest of the portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Linux core OS as part of feeding into OpenShift. That's important, having universal base image be the way we allow developers, we allow ISVs to build containers that are ready to deliver that rel experience on OpenShift or on rel. That's huge for us, pulling in capabilities like management with insights, pulling that directly into every sub, every rel 6, 7, 8 sub, right? To me, we've taken rel 8 is the first real step where we launch a product, but it's a portfolio launch. That's partly why it makes me so excited, right? I mean, being in rel is like being in all the products at Red Hat because we're the foundation of it. That's what I hope people walk away feeling, right? That the OS is important and it's core to the whole portfolio that Red Hat can deliver. Well, we look forward to the keynote tonight. Yes, to me too. I'm sure you're going to knock it out of the park as you always do. Thanks for joining us. And maybe if you have a little expertise on the side, give Brad Stevens a call. Celtics coach, I think he could use some advice right now. Oh, yes. You know, Stephanie Celtics on thin ice right now, but Red Hat very much. But the Bruins won, so. All right, okay, all right. I'll take it. It's a win, right? Stephanie, thank you. Thanks, John. Always a pleasure. Thanks, dude. Glad to have you with us. Back with more from the Red Hat Summit. 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