 Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Ansible Fest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back, everyone. theCUBE's live coverage here at Atlanta for Ansible Fest. Here's theCUBE coverage of Red Hat's event around automation for all. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Joe Fitzgerald, CUBE alum, Vice President and General Manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat. Great timing for Ansible. Great to have you back on theCUBE. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here at Ansible Fest. Super excited. We had a talk with four camera timing around Ansible. Stu and I did our intro analysis and platformization of automation, big move, big news. But there's a bigger trend at play here around automation. Why is the timing now for automation discussions with Ansible so good? The demand for automation is so broad in enterprises, right? They're trying to do everything DevOps tool chains to IoT devices, trying to deploy things faster, fix security vulnerabilities faster. It's all about speed, agility, efficiency. It all comes back to automation. And the news here is the general availability although available November as announced on keynote of the Ansible automation platform. So this is something that's been going on for a while. Ansible's just been growing. Now it's a platform. What's in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? So we've been on this journey with Ansible. Which started off as this incredibly simple, elegant architecture and a way to automate things. And what's happened over the past couple of years is it's exploded in terms of the number of people who are using it, the number of people who are generating automation, integration. And so in working with a lot of customers, right? What we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. Scale who could build, reuse, share, score content and track it, really important. So we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level really. You know we've been talking about Ansible, let's do going back when you know 2014 open stack. I think I remember we are first talking about the cube. It had a cult following when it emerged. You guys acquired it at what? The next year, 2015 roughly. But Ansible had this cult following of people who just love to get into the configuration side of things, make things go better. You guys acquired it, done well with it, kept it going, get the community flywheel keep rolling. A lot of progress since then. So what are you most proud of? What's the most notable things of the growth of the Ansible journey? What's the big story there? So it's almost four years since Red had acquired Ansible. And I remember when I proposed acquiring Ansible, Ansible was this small Eastern US company with sort of a community cult following, but very small in terms of commercials and reach and stuff like that. Mostly focused on the configuration space like a lot of the other automation tools. Over the past four years, probably the best thing we did that Red had is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best. The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded. If you were in the keynote this morning, it was number six on the repository list out of 100 million almost just a massive amount of projects and here it is at number six. So we didn't perturb the community, we actually helped it grow and we've been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product and technology into this very broad spectrum, now enterprise automation platform that crosses domains like networks and security and storage and cloud and windows, just a phenomenal growth in it. Joe, help explain how platform sets up Ansible for its future. They talked in the keynote a little bit about starting with some of the kind of core partners in the collections that they're offering, but in the future for a platform to really be a platform, it needs to be something that users themselves can build on top of. So help us understand where it is today when it first announced here for November and where it shall be going in the future. So we didn't use the platform word lightly. I think that platform has a set of connotations and sort of a set of requirements. What we saw was that different teams and groups inside organizations were bringing Ansible in and using the technology and having very good success in their particular area. Then what we saw was these teams were trying to share automation and collaborate across organizations. Then even in the community, there's tens of thousands of roles and playbooks out there that the community has built. There might be 300 that do the same thing, which is the best one, which one are people using, how successful is it, how long does it take? What we found was that they needed a bunch of tools to be able to collaborate, track analytics about stuff so that they could share and collaborate at a higher scale. Yeah, that's one of the great value propositions when we talk about SaaS is if it's done well, not only can I share internally, but I can learn from others that have used the platform and make it easier to take advantage of that. So is that part of that vision that you see with the platform? Yeah, so there's a couple of different ways of sharing. If you're running a SaaS service, then a central person is coordinating the sharing and things like that. What we tried to do with the Ansible platform is basically enable a way that people can share content without having to go through a central agent, if you will. So we provide services and things to help them manage their content with Galaxy and collections and things like that. It's all about organizing and being able to share content in a way to make them more efficient. Joe, talk about the trends around, you've done, first of all, you had a great job with Ansible, congratulations. The big fan of that company and you guys did a good job with it. As it goes forward, you're thinking about cloud complexities. As people start looking at the cloud equation hybrid and cloud 2.0 and the enterprise, complexity still is coming, there's more of it. How do you guys see that? How are you viewing that marketplace because it's not just one vertical, it's all categories. So how are you guys taking Ansible to the next level? How do you guys look at that, managing those complexities that are around the corner? Yeah, so if you think about it, everybody's moving towards a multi-hybrid cloud, sort of configuration, right? Each one of these platforms and clouds has their own set of tools which work really well perhaps in their particular cloud or their silo or their environment. If you're an organization and you're running multi-cloud, you're responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don't want to have different silos of automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. So the fact that Ansible can automate across these both on-premise and in the public clouds, multiple public clouds, across domains, network, storage, compute, create accounts, do all sorts of things that you're going to need to do. So it's one automation technology that will span the complexity of those environments. So it really is, I don't see how people are going to do it otherwise without fielding lots of people and lots of tools. You know, we were talking with Stephanie and Sue and I talked on our intro insights segment around the word scale. It's been kicked around, certainly it's changing a lot of the landscape on how companies are modernizing the open source equation, but it's also changing the people equation. I want you to explain your vision on this because I think this is a key point that we're seeing in our community where people have told us that automation provides great efficiency, et cetera, good security, but job satisfaction is a real big part of it. You know, people, it's a people challenge. This is about people, your view on scale and people. So organizations are under tremendous pressure right now to do more, right? Whether it's deploy a new application faster, to close security vulnerabilities faster, to move things around, to right size, you know, resources and applications and things like that. And, you know, Ansible allows them to do that in a way where they can be much more efficient and be much more responsive to the business, right? Otherwise, you know, you see some of the customer testimonials here where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes. The, you know, teams can be far more productive. It really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible to automate network storage and compute in the same playbook. Before those were three different tools or three teams. And people are solving some of the same problems in different areas, and this is where playbooks can be a problem and an opportunity because if you have too many playbooks, you're going to know which playbook to be available. I mean, you can almost have a playbook of playbooks. I mean, this is kind of an opportunity to use the sharing collaboration piece. What's your, what's your thought on that, as that playbook complexity comes in, as more playbooks enter the- Well, organizations, you know, there's a lot of deployment of the same kind of stack or the same kind of configuration and things like that. So, you know, it's really extending community beyond, you know, working on code into working on content right around automation. So if somebody wants to deploy Nginx, I think there's over 300 different, you know, playbooks to deploy Nginx, right? We don't want to have 5,000 playbooks to deploy Nginx. Why can't there be a couple that people take and say, wow, this is perfect. I can tweak it for my organization, integrate my particular systems, and I can hit the ground running instead of trying to either start from a, you know, blank page or to go sift through hundreds of almost close, you know, playbooks that do sort of the same thing. So a lot of time savings, big time. Enormous. So, Joe, you know, congratulations on the four years of just continued growth, you know, great momentum in the community. Wanting to touch on, you know, the big move, you know, in the last year is, you know, IBM spending, you know, quite a few dollars to acquire Red Hat. What will this mean for kind of the reach and activity around Ansible in the community, the IBM acquisition? So, IBM had been involved in Ansible in a number of their, you know, products, right, in terms of integration into Ansible. So they have teams and folks within IBM that obviously got Ansible before the acquisition. I think that it's highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring security and things like that. All those things inevitably turn to automation, right? So I think it really, it not only gives us access to IBM and their sort of, you know, their channel and their accounts and their reach, but also their teams that have these sets of technologies that are natural complement. You know, whether it's Watson driving Ansible or security or network monitoring driving Ansible automation, it's a really powerful combination. Yeah, well, so just want to get your kind of macro level view on automation. I sat on a panel talking to CIS admins about careers and it was the number one thing that they felt they needed to embrace. We see like the RPA community, probably in adjacency to what you see, heavily pushing automation. Help explain how important automation is in that it's not just a silver bullet also. Yeah, so a lot of times people are, the sort of the easy description is automation's going to eliminate jobs or things like that. I think it's more like sort of the power tool analogy. If you had a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you've got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer and all sorts of additional things, they're force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right? And that's what every organization is driving them to do. How agile can it be? Are competition deployed something? How fast can we deploy it? How many new releases a week can we deploy? When security hits, how fast can we close the vulnerabilities at hours, days, weeks, or can we do it in minutes? The old expression, if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but if you're an agile hammer, you can adjust to figure out the opportunity. It's kind of awesome kind of quote there. This speaks to the changes. I want to get your thoughts. Last question for you is, as someone's been in the industry for a while, when we first interviewed, I think 2014 at OpenStack, when we first started chatting around the industry, so much has changed. Now more than ever, the modern enterprise is looking at cloud impact as an operating model. Cloud 1.0, Amazon, compute storage, stand up some software in there, piece of cake, startups were doing it. Now as enterprises really want to crack the code on cloud software, automation, observability, these new categories are emerging. Kind of speaks to this cloud 2.0. How would you describe that to folks if asked, what's the modern era enterprise cloud architecture look like? What is cloud 2.0? How would you take a stab at that definition? So I would say after all these years, cloud is really entering its infancy. And what does that mean? We're just starting now to appreciate what can be built in cloud and we're going to get a big boost soon with 5G, which is going to increase the amount of data, the amount of edge devices, IoT and things like that. The cloud is becoming the first choice for people when they build their architectures and their business. It's going to fundamentally change everything. So I think some people, what's the quote? Some people overestimate what a technology can do in the short term and underestimate what it can do in the long term. We're now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud-based applications. You see this as a big wave then, big time. A huge wave. Yeah, I mean we had a quote Stu on theCUBE last week, data's the new software. So software abstractions, automation, this is the new way. I mean it's a whole new architecture. So exciting. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it, Joe. Thanks for having me. We're here at the Ansible Fest theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Breaking down the analysis, getting into the automation for all conversation, big category developing, we're covering it here live. We'll be back more after this short break.