 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm here with my co-host, Dave Valenti. Joining us is Marco Bill Peters. He is the Vice President of Customer Experience and Engagement at Red Hat. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So I want to start out by talking about your management philosophy, and your philosophy really of what you do, because that is just so core to the Red Hat experience for the Red Hat experience for customers. I noticed that you changed the name, it's no longer customer support, it is customer experience and engagement. Do you want to talk a little bit about why you made that switch? Yeah, I think, well, yes, yes, that would be awesome. I mean, the name reflects actually, in my opinion, also the business model from Red Hat, which is like, you take an open source development model, you develop the products, you actually sell them as a subscription. But there's no license behind it, which is the amazing business model, right? That there's no lock-in, right? The customer can buy it, they can use it. If we don't provide the value, then shame on us and they can move on. And so that's where the customer experience has to be good, right? That they really see, hey, I got something from Red Hat. I'm coming back, I renew this. And engagement is as well, it's the part, one is like experience was great and engagement, we got to engage them, right? Because shame on us, if we didn't engage a customer during their journey, during that year of subscription life that they have, or three year or whatever it is, that is the, I think it's the business model, but it's also my philosophy, which is, I used to work for proprietary companies and running support or customer success functions. There is, you make the money on the license and the maintenance is basically, I always call it janitorial services. And this way, our model is different, so that's why I also report to Paul Camilla, it's integrated in technologies. It's maybe not the philosophy, but it's our philosophy, really, the customer, it's not a joke, it's a customer is in the center and if they are successful, yes, they will come back, they will buy more, they will renew, but it's an honest model and so that's why we changed the name for various reasons. I also, we looked at other functions at Red Hat and said, which one is really about customer experience and security, for example, is in my team, right? It's not just support, because security is a big element of our value that we provide and so that's why we expand that the team changed the name to kind of reflect that. You mentioned Paul Cormier and we're actually, he's going to be joining us later today, too. And he was talking about how the design process is really led by customers in this new era of cloud computing. Talk a little bit about what it's like to collaborate with customers in these products. It's really good, I can give you a good example from the innovation award winners this week, right? We have, for example, British Columbia, the government of British Columbia and they started this journey and they wanted to create this, I would say, exchange for partners that they have, companies to kind of provide some services and make it easier for them. And they started on a journey and it didn't go well and shame on whoever was involved in that but then we got involved, it's like, okay, that's what you're trying to solve. Then we got one of my guys actually flew out, they spent a few weeks out there and was like, oh, this is the problem, let's build it differently than Ashish but the money from the OpenShift team got involved and we realized, okay, what they're trying to do is this, okay, let's change the product to adjust it. There's one example, from last year's innovation award winner, we had Betfair, it's a horse race company in England, same thing, they wanted to really innovate the data center in a complete like software-defined way and having that collaboration with us directly and the upstream communities but then also with partners like in that case, it was a software-defined network provider to get involved and they really built the solutions as a whole different way and if you go back a few years when we just did Linux, that maybe didn't really happen because it was more Linux was driven by the community and now I think it's honestly good to see because it's customers are involved, there's still a lot of partners involved and there is a strong community and that whole thing working together is pretty cool to see. There's a saying that I like, it's customer satisfaction is one thing, customer loyalty is everything and so you live in a world where customer loyalty really is everything so described, you mentioned before you were a previous company, what's the innovation experience and total customer experience like now? How do you innovate versus the way a traditional company might innovate in customer experience? I think traditional companies, they innovate around, since it's a maintenance budget, we get a safe cost, right? That's their take, it's like a safe cost, deflect cases, deflect customers basically, right? And our model is the opposite, right? If I start deflecting customers, that's kind of the negative of engagement, right? So pushing back customers that actually, they see value if they have interaction so that's where we look at it completely differently, we innovate around, like two years ago when we talked about we presented Red Hat Insights, the tooling that basically out of our customer support cases we provide back to customers a connection that they know, hey, this might happen and that's one piece that you saw probably at the keynote today, it's integrated in our products now, right? And so that's one piece that we innovate, it's like support is not seen as an afterthought, it's like how do we build this into our tooling? So Insights was a good example as an innovation. We did a lot of workflow changes which sounds very tactical, but really to provide more value back to the customers, right? So it's called a knowledge-centered support approach that you really basically take what customers provide you, rephrase that and provide it back as a documentation. Hey, if you run into this situation and it can be a support situation, but it can also innovation situation, they want to build something new, you provide that back in the form of documentation on a customer. One of the other things that's changed in the last two years is this explosion of artificial intelligence, some people call it cognitive, we saw it in the kickoff video this morning. And we talked about this a little bit a couple of years ago, how are you going to use data to improve customer experiences? And now we're here, how are you using data and Insights and analytics to improve the customer? So analytics, I think like we started in a way in a traditional way, right? You have data and then you got to figure out the data and then you can kind of just create rules out of it. If this and this happen, you do this, right? It's kind of call it AI sounds cool, but basically it's a rules matching. This happens there. And now I think it's detecting the trends more automatically. That's more than in, I would say called more real AI as in, and that's where we are. I would say the last year we spent more time figuring out how do we, instead of like trying manually find the trends to actually automatically find them. And I think there is, I just gave an interview a few weeks in Japan where AI is a really hot topic. I think we're just scratching the surface. I mean, you saw it in autonomous driving, but I think in support there is so much more to do in this area as well. When I asked you about juxtaposing Red Hat versus say a traditional software company, it would seem like cutting costs was in conflict with innovating for customer experience. But when I hear you speak about AI, is it possible there's a relationship between the two that you can actually improve customer service and cut costs? Absolutely, yeah. But you do want to do it in a good way, right? You want to do it in a way that it provides value back to the customer. If you do it in a way, hey, we cut out these things and the customer just gets a lousy experience because it really doesn't, I think that doesn't even work for a traditional company or proprietary company anymore. That whole old deflaming or like there's other companies that do auto deflection, right? But I think if you actually optimize the experience in a way that also the customer sees, hey, this is actually great value, right? If you just optimize things and customer experience is great, you might actually create a situation where customer doesn't see value, right? I mean, like in the old days, we had a lot of customers saying, hey, I never had the support case. Why should I pay you guys? And so, obviously you can talk about, well, that's great, you didn't have a support case, but customer paying a few millions and they only had one support case is a tough recovery. Today, not AI, but a lot of data is, we can tell the customer, yeah, you had one support case, but look at all the tools you used on the customer portal, all the interactions you have. We have a nice dashboard we can present back to a customer. And I give you, if you have a minute, a story with a CTO from a bank that a few years we met, and then he said, oh, redhead, you guys are good, there was on the bar, you guys are good, but you know, I don't really need your support mark. My guys, they know how to do things, right? And so I thought it was like, okay. So in the evening, I went back to the hotel, looked at the dashboard, and then realized his story was maybe not as realistic. Next day, I see him again, I show him the dashboard, and he was, support was involved, there was documentation using that. I showed him back as like, look at this, this is the value we provided. And out of that came a whole different discussion as in we do it annually now, and we look at this data, and he sees trends, he sees like, oh, my Latin America bank, they still use these and these. My North America team does that and that. And it's a whole different discussion, it's awesome, right? That they realize from the data we have, there's a lot of value that he can change his operation. There's a short example. I want to talk to you about security. You'd mentioned this earlier in our conversation. The era of cloud computing is maturing, and we are seeing now customers caring more about compliance and governance and management. What are the big concerns that you're hearing from customers? Obviously, the big concern is still the traditional vulnerabilities, right? If there is a security hole, how do we fix it, how quickly fix it? Do we have the right data that we provide back as a customer realizes, is this a security hole I need to worry about or not? And that's what we do. We kind of focus on, we have a pretty large security team, I think for the size we are, because of the open source model, that they're involved in a lot of the communities. So we provide fast response and we also provide response, not just with a security fix, but also like with information about, hey, this is why you should worry or this is why you shouldn't worry. Because sometimes the press creates this frenziness about, hey, pick your favorite name of a security or a heartbeat, et cetera. And for some customers, it doesn't really matter, because in their environment, this is not a real scenario, right? And so we provide the patch, we provide data or documentation, but then also tooling that they can figure out are we exposed or not. So that's one of things, that's still a big problem. The other problem is in containers, right? You have these containers, you build the containers from everywhere to actually realize, hey, is this container also compliant with security? It's a big topic. And we just released, released, or we will release this week. It's not a secret, the container catalog with actually a scoring that actually says, yes, this container is quality A, B, and kind of a freshness score that tells, yes, this is good. Yeah, rating. This is a huge effort for every company. And we do it as well as in, how do we keep these containers updated, right? Because if you build a container from application to middleware down to the operating system, you got a variable, a lot of security. It's a fresh date. It's like expiration date, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that's what we do actually. We have an expiration date depending on security hole, that just changes. So we were talking to John Hodgson who owes up the keynote as well. And he was telling us, and he mentioned this in the keynote, they went from 17 developers in 2009 to 1600 today. And he was talking about these are, a lot of them are kids right out of college and we were talking about how you have to treat millennials differently and give them flexible time. And Rebecca, you were talking about a new way to work at the beginning of our segments today. So how does that new way to work affect the customer experience? And what are you guys doing in that regard? I mean, obviously, like you say, right? There's a whole new generation coming. And I actually think like, I think the new generation, they're actually pretty sensitive customer experience, right? I think they're growing up in a different age of like digital age. So they're in social media as well. So I actually, I'm pretty, I was worried that had a new generation maybe, but I have to say it's a, I think contrary, right? So it's a, so that's good. So I don't think customer experience will suffer. What will change is like, you can't have people, you know, we don't have it, but like call centers, if you have a little farm, everybody that just ain't going to fly anymore, right? And so that's where we get our justice out. We don't do call centers, but we get it just adjust, you know, like how is the office done? You know, like where is it? You know, and things like that. But it's, I think, you know, I'm not too worried about that. And mobile is huge for you guys, obviously, right? The mobile trend. And there's a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about, you know, what's next beyond mobile? This is not how we're going to interface with our two thumbs in the future. It's going to be voice. You have to be careful not to over-rotate either, right? Because you could ruin the customer experience. But do you do that type of advanced, you know, research and total customer experience? Yeah, we do, we do research. We actually also research, how do they interact with us? And you know, like mobile is always a topic, but our customers aren't engaging us mobile. You know, like it's, they, they, you say they're not? They're not. No, there's a, you know, like our portal is all mobile enabled, so you could go with it. But mostly it's still laptops, notebooks, et cetera, that they're using to engage us. So we haven't really invested a lot in that, but we invest in the digital experience, right? So make it easier. Provide the tooling. Don't force a customer to jump through like hoops to find something out. Give them the, give them the, you know, tool to find out that they want to self-solve a lot, right, which it goes back in the old discussion is that deflection. But if a self-solve tool helps you, I think customers see this, hey, this is a value from Red Hat. If they can do it themselves. Yeah, if they can and they can learn something, right? It's, it's, that part is good. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Marco Bill Peters, who is the vice president, customer experience and engagement at Red Hat. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll be back after this break.