 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Moscone North here in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Dave Vellante. You're watching four days of live wall-to-wall coverage here at IBM Think 2019. Happy to welcome back to the program. First time in her new role, and she's also moved back to Dave and my home area of the Boston, Massachusetts area. Stephanie Shiris, who's now the Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit at Red Hat. Stephanie, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, it's my pleasure, Stu. It's great to be back with you both. All right, Stephanie, to be back, I happen to notice quite a few IBMers, obviously know you. We've had you on our program and many of the IBM shows in the past. So tell us, what's it like being back at one of the big blue shows? No, it's great, it's great. As you know, I somewhat grew up at IBM, right? I had 17 years, I know so many people and the thing you miss most is in the network. So it's been, it's a great opportunity to be here. Catch up with old friends, talk to new colleagues, great. What brought you to Red Hat? I mean, like you say, long career at IBM, and it was obviously prior to the acquisition, so you didn't know that was coming. What was the lore? So I'd say a couple of things. Clearly, as you know, I became a student of the Linux space while I was in, while I was at IBM in the power systems unit. So, fascinated for what Linux has taught the industry about, I always say, Linux taught the world how development is meant to be done through open source and the innovation of a community. So that was a thrilling aspect for me to join. Also, I think I truly believe in the open hybrid multicloud strategy that Red Hat has had actually for years now. I think open source is all about choice and flexibility. It's what Linux provides and moving forward their strategy around having a management portfolio, having a Kubernetes platform, all built upon being able to consume Linux wherever and however you want it. I believe in the strategy, so it's been really exciting and having the rel aspect is fantastic. So, Stephanie, you're right. You own really the core of Red Hat's business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we've been covering this space heavily for years and everything that Red Hat's doing comes back to that Linux kernel there. A lot of people don't really understand that the business model say it's like, oh, well, you know, Red Hat sells free and oh, that's a service model and things like that. Bring us inside your business and what's exciting and dynamic and happening in that space. Yeah, it's such an incredible time. I couldn't ask for a better job. But I love the Linux space for a couple of things. As you look at all the things that are changing in the industry today, I always say to customers, you may not know the applications you'll run next year and three years and five years. You may not know where you'll want to run them. What you do know is they'll run on Linux. It's the fastest growing operating system in the industry today. It's number one choice of developers. So as you look to see what can you do to prepare for the innovation, it's pick your Linux. And Red Hat has done an incredible job of making it consumable. If you look at the hundreds of thousands of packages out there in open source, you take that, you pull it into, really I feel what REL delivers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers, is an ecosystem. It's a trusted ecosystem. We test, the team does an incredible job of testing a breadth of hardware. Everything from X86 systems to power systems to Z to NVIDIA DGX. So we test all of that and then all the way up to the applications. We pull that ecosystem with us. Now our goal is to be able to provide that anywhere. So you take that capability, whether you do a bare metal virtual machine, public cloud, private cloud. Now you move into containers. You know, everything we do in REL translates over to OpenShift. Whether you consume it as a private cloud in OpenStack or containerized in OpenShift, all of that ecosystem follows through. So it really is what I look at is the bedrock of the entire portfolio for Red Hat. And we really are an enterprise software company today. We pull in management with things like Ansible and Satellite. You pull all that together, automation. You have the storage portfolio. It's just such an exciting time. It's a real transition from going from an OS company and building upon that to be truly an enterprise software company for multiple clouds. So talk a little bit more about that because OpenShift gets all the buzz. Extensively, it was a key linchpin of the acquisition that IBM made. But what's the connection between REL and the rest of Red Hat's portfolio? Maybe you could connect those dots first. Yeah, that would be. So as you look at, and I'm an infrastructure person for a long time, as you know, and coming from the infrastructure up space, most IT was purchased from an infrastructure view for many years. Now it's all about how you consume the applications and the infrastructure comes in and feeds it. From an application space, containers are amazing, right? They bring that incredible flexibility, start it, stop it, move it, lift it, shift it, everything. The thing is from an application perspective, it's simple. From a Linux perspective, it's actually much more complicated. In the days of bare metal or even VMs, quite clean cut between your systems, your operating system, your hypervisor and your application. Once you move into a containerized world, you've split up your Linux. You have user space in your container. You have Kubernetes making 10 times the number of calls to the kernel space that the hypervisor ever did, much more complicated. So as you move into that space of Kubernetes and containers and orchestration, you really want someone who knows Linux because the Linux space is more complicated, bringing simplicity from a container and application deployment. So performance management, security changes, right? Absolutely, automation. So really as we look at the portfolio, we have a, you know, we believe strongly in the customer experience we deploy with RAL, that trusted ecosystem. In order to be able to take that into a container world, we need to be able to get access into the user space, into the Kubernetes and into the kernel because they're so intimately twined. So as we transition that, OpenShift is the way we deliver it. We build upon the same RAL kernel, we use the user space. Yeah, so Stephanie, like you, I'm an infrastructure person and my background is in the OS and down that environment. There's been a wave of just enough operating system. How do we slice these up? I look of CoreOS, which Red Hat acquired, was originally, oh, we're going to slim down the kernel and make things easily. Where is the innovation still happening in Linux and why is still Linux going to be relevant going forward? You talked about containers, things like serverless, all threatened to say, oh, well, my application development person shouldn't have to think about it, but why is it still important? Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I love about my role is with the position that Red Hat has in the industry with RAL and, you know, we have approximately 50,000 customers who use RAL and trust us. So as we look at how we drive innovation, I love the ability to, we can kind of help redefine what an operating system is and, you know, certainly we bring added value. We did in RAL 7 and now we have the RAL 8 beta out, so we're continuously adding things. We added in a few things about consumption base. We added app streams, which separates out the ability to update your user space at a different rate and pace than your core sort of base level, which allows you to do faster updates in your user space, continue on your core, run multiple versions of your user space. It's a fantastic way to pull an innovation faster. We've also done a number of things with our capabilities around taking that first step into containerization, including tools like Buildup, Podman, Scopio, so that within the operating system itself you can do those base kind of capabilities for containerization. That first step and then when you need orchestration you can move over to OpenShift. So there's a ton of innovation left in the operating system. Security is core to everything we do. So the innovation around security remains a constant. We're in the typical open source fashion. We've released the beta here in November. We're gathering great feedback. We have about 140 high touch beta customers who we're working hand in hand with to get feedback and we're looking forward to bringing RAL 8 to market. What are the big pieces of feedback you're getting? What are people excited about in terms of RAL 8? Certainly everyone looks to us for their security. So that's been a great place for us. We had work to do on making it easier to consume as we continue to drive things with developers and we have a new portal that's allowing sort of a single user space view. Those kinds of consumption things are very important today because as you said, you want skills to be easily transferable, easily updated. So a lot of the consumption based things we've been working on as well as the tooling. Yeah, you talk about that skill set. That's one of the biggest challenges in a multi-cloud world is if I'm going to live in all these environments, what's the same and what's different? Kubernetes is only a small piece, but Linux is something that's transferable. What are you seeing? What are you hearing from customers in that regard? Yeah, I think, and that's one thing we're working hard to try and make sure that I think like when you buy a house, right? You can buy a house, you can buy an apartment building, you can buy an office building. What doesn't change is the land underneath. You need that land to be stable and you can build whatever you want on it. And that's how we view our Linux. Consume it anywhere you want. It's always secure, it's always stable in multiple public clouds. I think really it's the flexibility. When I look at that whole open hybrid cloud space, customers aren't looking to buy a product, they're looking to establish a relationship with someone who's going to provide them what they need to do today on their mission critical applications, but have the flexibility going forward to take them where they want to go. They may pick one public cloud today, they want to move it in two years in three years to a different public cloud. It's establishing that relationship to be able to consume that Linux, preserve those skills, but have the flexibility in tomorrow. Red Hat's made a number of storage acquisitions recently. Obviously the tight relationship between the operating system and the IO. How do you look at that space, the opportunity, the TAM, talk a little bit about the storage momentum. Yeah, so clearly we have our storage division. We've been working very closely with them to build up capabilities. Largely you'll see it with OpenShift. The containerization and storage management within containers is tricky business. So as we pull together the collaboration between our storage unit as well as our container unit, that's providing real capabilities for that ease of consumption. How do you bring the storage with the container deploys? My team has worked very closely with the management team. As you pull in the management aspect with things like automation and management, satellite capabilities, Ansible is an amazing tool. Amazing tool. In fact, we've pulled in things like system roles directly into the operating system so that you can set up things like networking. You can set up storage with Ansible playbooks in a much simpler way. That's allowing us to get that ease of consumption. It is about, you know, David's fully about being able for us to leverage the portfolio. How do we allow clients to take the journey using Linux from everything, from bare metal and VMs out to containerization, pull in multiple clouds, get the storage features and functions and get the automation and management. So Stephanie, you would look at and partnered with Red Hat quite a bit before you would join the company. What surprised you, coming inside the company, is there anything being on the inside now that you look back and you're like, wow, I didn't expect that was different than what I had seen from the outside. You know, I think what I love and surprised me a bit was the passion of open source. You know, you look at any company from the outside and certainly as a student from the outside, you look at the business and how the business is doing and how it's growing and study all of that. What you don't get to see from the outside is the open source passion of the developers who I get to work with every day. I mean, they just, they understand the market, they do it as a hobby on the weekends. It's just unbelievable, right? I love being up in Westford, as you know, with all the developers, it's great. So I got to ask you, you know, a lot of talk about the culture, you know, between Red Hat and IBM. You've been in both camps now. What are your thoughts on the culture? So, you know, I think when I look at the culture, I love the culture at Red Hat. As you know, I've been in many places at IBM in multiple divisions and multiple units. There's a lot of autonomy between the business units at IBM from my own experience and there's so many people I miss working with, colleagues at IBM that, you know, I worked hand in hand with and we brought amazing things to market. So I look forward to working with them again. You know, I always look for those groups that are passionate and there's a lot of passionate IBMers I miss working with. So I look forward to bringing that back. All right, Stephanie, want to give you the final word? We know, you know, Jim Whitehurst's got a presentation he's doing later today, I believe. Red Hat has a good presence there. Tell us, Red Hat, hear it, think what should be people be looking for. Yeah, I think, so clearly there's a lot of buzz and excitement about what both Red Hat and IBM can do together for the open hybrid cloud. I come at it now from a full Linux perspective and I couldn't be more excited about what Linux is going to deliver for innovation and for customers to consume in innovation. As we pull in and look to all the discussion that will happen with Jim and Ginny on stage today, it's great, we'll be able to take what Red Hat has done and scale it now with the help of IBM. So, very excited about the future. All right, well, Stephanie, we really appreciate you sharing, congratulations on the progress there. Great to see you, thanks for the time. So we still have, you know, about three more days left here at IBM thinking, of course, the CUBE will be at Red Hat Summit 2019, which is back in Boston, Massachusetts. For Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.