 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back. We're talking about certifications for this segment. Happy to have on the program, Randy Russell, who's the director of certifications from Red Hat down the end, and Felipe Sabajos, who is with CQ Services in the lovely red fedora. Thank you both gentlemen for joining us. Hi, good afternoon, how are you? Randy, if I could start with you, if you could just talk a little bit about your role, kind of the breadth of the certification program at Red Hat? Right, so I am the director of the certification program at Red Hat, and by certification I mean certifying people. We also have certification programs that certify technologies and things like that. I'm in the people certification program, and the people certification program is basically a means for helping individuals show that they have ability on Red Hat technologies and for recruiters and employers to find people who have those kinds of abilities and who know how to use our technologies effectively. Everybody who's a Red Hat certified professional earns their certification by taking one or more challenging hands-on practical exams, and that's one of the things that's unique about Red Hat is that we are absolutely committed to the hands-on approach. Every single cert, every single exam is hands-on. Okay, great. So Felipe, first of all, congratulations. You are the certified professional of the year out of tens of thousands of certified Red Hat people, but before we get into the accolades and the certifications, can you tell us a little bit about what your company does and what your role is there? Okay, nice to meet you. My name is Felipe Ceballos. I'm from Colombia. I work for CAC Servicios. We are working in implementing Red Hat products and open source technologies in Colombia, Latin America. And my daily job as a technical leader is help to solve the more complex cases for our all co-workers in the support and the project area. Talk about what's in the South American part of the world, Central American part of the world, what's the concerns of your customers? What do they come to you? What kind of challenges do they have every day that you're helping them solve? Yeah, every day we are improving our customer satisfaction by giving them values and implementing solutions with high availability, high scalability, and then giving them more value, making them happy. We're with Red Hat products and good, very solutions for them. Randy, can you talk? We're here honoring Felipe as the certified professional of the year. Why do you have a program like this? I mean, certifications, lots of reasons why people get them, advance their career and the like. So tell us a little bit about some of the honors. Well, so we have a few objectives here. First, we do have thousands of people who do earn the certification, and we want to actually showcase them a little bit. And one way to do that among several is that we do have the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year program, which gives us an opportunity to showcase an individual who stands out among all of our many Red Hat Certified professionals. But in also showcasing that individual, we're actually able to showcase the program and bring attention to these very qualified, skilled professionals that we have worldwide over 200 countries. Yeah, you talked about just the program of selecting the certified person of the year. What did you do? What did you accomplish for your customer that was far and away better than everybody else? Well, we implemented a virtualization platform for our customer because he was facing some latencies and he couldn't attend the amount, a big amount of users. So we implemented with this solution with a kind of new processor of technology, which is, for IBM, which is Power 8. So with this solution, the customer had many, many, many more users, can attend many more users and had more safety in their databases. We had an ability cluster and scalability. The customer was very, very happy with our solution and with the product and mainly for the Red Hat products. Okay. So an interesting thing to know about this project that CQ and Felipe worked on is it's, it was very much around performance constraints. So they have a customer that provides a vehicle management service, fleet management basically for government entities and so on. So you have to think about, if you bring in a new entity, it's not just a single user. They're bringing in a database with a whole lot of thousands of cars that now have to go into the database. So scale is a big issue and performance had become an issue. And one of the things that's really impressive about the implementation that they did, first of all, you did what? Like a, was it a 32 node cluster? Six clusters. Six clusters, right, for VRT and basically built out something that could scale rapidly and improve performance in a very significant way. In fact, I believe Andres, Andres is the CEO. He was saying that there was a performance gain on some operations from something that took three days. Yes. And now it took about two, three hours to marry their deployments. So I mean, that's a huge benefit to the end customer. If you can take an operation that goes, that went for three days to accomplish, to just being a two hour one, that's really what scale and performance is about. And that's what CQ and in Felipe in particular delivered to that customer. Yeah. Well, and I think it highlights another important fact. It's, you talked about power eight. You're talking about an older technology, modernizing it with virtualization. And then you're local. They're going to be able to retain and use your expertise to help them going forward. This isn't just technology. This is people plus technology to make them successful. Yeah, because it was an amazing experience because we're working with the customer. We're showing communication every day in order to make a successful project. And it was a very, very good experience. And it was a lot of hard work and dedication. So Felipe, how do you look at certifications as part of your overall career and your daily job? The certifications, I think it's our very important point in our careers as engineers because they can help us to acquire all technical knowledge in order to satisfy our customers and make them happy with the solutions and solve complex problems in a very efficient and very quick way. So that's very important for our careers. Great, and Randy, can you speak to, what certifications are happening here at Red Hat Summit? How do people get certified? What kind of activities are happening? Well, so we are actually offering two of our biggest programs here at Red Hat Summit tomorrow morning. Our Red Hat Certified System Administrator exam will be available tomorrow morning and a Red Hat Certified Engineer exam will be available. And we have a number of people who are signed up for those. The thing is, is that we actually make these exams available worldwide all year long. So you don't have to come to Summit to get them and they are actually available in a lot of countries and we're going to be expanding availability considerably. Now, Felipe, interestingly enough, when he flies back before he goes home to Columbia, he's going to actually stop in Miami and take one of our exams. The hardest one. The hardest one, which concerns performance tuning. But I think given his background and so on, I think that he could have written the exam so we're expecting him to do very, very well on it. Excellent, yeah. So Felipe, I want to give you the last word. You know, what does winning this award mean to you? And also, how'd you get that hat? It was very, I'm very proud. I'm very proud of wearing this hat because it was a lot of dedication and the message is go and enjoy the open source and enjoy the life and be a certificate as Red Hat engineers because it's a very important point because this certification gives you the ability to solve problems in a very quick and a smart way. All right, Bob. Randy and Felipe, thank you so much for sharing all the updates on what's happening here and around the world on certifications. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Red Hat 2016 in San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE.