(upbeat techno music) >> Host: Live,
from Boston Massachusetts, it's the Cube,
covering Red Hat Summit 2017,
brought to you by Red Hat.
>> Welcome to day two of the Red Hat Summit
here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
with my co-host, Stu Miniman.
We are welcoming Jim Whitehurst,
who is the president and CEO of Red Hat.
Thanks so much for taking the time
to sit down with us.
>> Thanks, it's great to be here.
>> So, I want to talk about the theme
of this year's conference,
which is celebrating the impact of the individual.
In your keynote you talked about
the goal of leadership today
is to create a context for the individual
to try, to modify, to fail, to just keep going.
Sounds great.
How do you do that?
>> Well that's why I say, leadership is about
creating a context for that to happen.
So you have to create a safe environment
for people to try and fail.
And you know, this is a tough one,
because somebody fails 20 times, you know,
maybe it's time him to find a new career.
>> Rebecca: (laughs)
>> But, you have to create the opportunity
for people to fail in a safe way
and actually then learn from that.
And one of the things I talk a lot about,
especially CEOs and CIOs is,
you got to create that context.
The world that we used to live in
was all about taking variance out,
you know, Lean Six Sigma process.
Innovation's all about injecting variance in,
and there's no way to inject variance in
without making errors.
So how do you, I want to say reward making errors,
but you certainly want to reward risk taking
and recognize, by definition,
some risks aren't going to play out.
And that's all about culture.
Yeah, it's about process and reward systems,
but it's mainly about culture.
>> So reward, risk taking, no blaming,
what are some other defining elements
of this culture in which individuals
can feel free to take risks?
>> Well, I think a big part of it
is you have to celebrate
the people who try things
And you celebrate taking the risk.
You don't necessarily celebrate the successes, right?
It's like, you know, in school,
you miss something, that's bad,
you get something right, that's good.
Well we have a tendency to say,
let's celebrate the successes,
versus actually celebrating the risk taking.
And so, there are some processes
and systems you have to put in place.
You have to have systems in place to make sure
no one can risk 100 million dollars.
If every Red Hatter could risk 100 million dollars,
we'd be in trouble.
But you have to figure out
how you give enough latitude,
enough free time.
And, I was just yesterday talking
to some Red Hatters who had moved over from IBM.
They said, "It's great, we can try new things."
Now, try new things within a context of
a certain amount of budget or a certain amount of time.
So there are processes and systems
you have to put in place,
but ultimately it's culture more than anything else.
It trumps anything else.
>> Jim, in your keynote, you said,
planning is dead, and that, you know,
we're lousy predictors, things are changing so fast.
Your role though, you're CEO of a public company
that has 60 quarters of consecutive revenue growth.
So, it seems you guys are doing pretty well
at getting involved in some of the waves
that are happening, understanding how to keep growing
at a steady pace.
Maybe you can reconcile that a little bit for us,
as to how you're doing that.
>> Yeah, so, one of the reasons that I think
that we've been able to navigate
a whole set of fairly significant transitions
in technology is that we don't select technology,
we select communities.
And I think that's a really important subtlety.
So, we didn't come in and say,
"Oh, we like OpenStack more than we like
CloudStack of Eucalyptus
or the other opensource IaaS
that were out five years ago.
We looked and observed that OpenStack
had built the biggest user base.
You know the reason we're significantly involved
in Kubernetes today, versus Diego, or Swarm,
or the other orchestrators for containers out there,
is we observed it was
building the biggest community.
And, we don't just glom on,
we actually kind of get in and contribute ourselves.
But we look more to say
what are the best communities
and let's get involved in that.
I don't know what the Kubernetes roadmap is
for the next five years,
but I'm confident that it has the best community
that will drive the right direction for--
>> It's probably a little over-simplified to say
you looked for the VHS ecosystem
versus the Betamax best technology.
>> Rachael: (laughs) >> No, exactly.
Exactly, but that's what we think we're good at
is observing when a community is the best community.
And I say that, it's not just a matter of observation.
Whether it's OpenStack or Kubernetes,
we get in a help think about governance, right?
So, one of the things
I think really helped OpenStack
is we saw it had the best user community,
but we help put together the governance structure,
which truly made it neutral, made it open.
And so, we try to actually help in doing that,
but it really is about identifying communities
rather than technologies.
>> Is it ever possible that you could
identify the right community
that might have certain elements,
but it's got elements that wouldn't quite work
for the opensource way, can you change
that community?
Is it possible to go in
and push a new culture into that community?
>> We think we're actually pretty good at that.
Now, I think there's a mix of
not every community has to be the same.
We often talk about, there is no opensource community.
There are are literally
two million open source communities.
And Linux has a culture,
many of our projects in JBoss.
So Drools is different than Fuse
that's different than others.
And so, it's okay that the cultures can be different.
The key is they all have to have a common element
about being open, and committing to being open,
and truly being a meritocracy,
cause if they best ideas don't win,
that's when communities fall apart.
And that's actually one of the biggest places
where they fall apart.
So, I do think we can influence open,
and I think just by our contributions
we probably influence the cultures
of some of those communities.
But we don't try to say is there's a Red Hat way
to do community.
There are a lot of different ways.
>> Jim, we look at the cloud space,
open is one of these terms
that doesn't necessarily mesh
with your definition with what the cloud guys do.
You guys, of course, supported Red Hat Linux
in every single cloud environment
that I can think of.
For many years
you have a expanded partnership with AWS.
But, I was debating with Sam Ramji yesterday,
from Google, about like, there is no open cloud.
There are clouds that use opensource,
opensource can live here,
but all the big public clouds
are built on their platforms
and openness is a challenge there.
What's your thought as to how you fit there?
And then we'll want to get into
some of the discussion of the AWS announcement.
>> Yeah, sure.
So, in defense of the public clouds,
it's impossible to offer a physical offering
that has hardware in a software stack
without it having some of your technologies
that don't make it totally open, right?
Or transferable. >> Is this why
we never saw a Red Hat Open Cloud?
>> Well, it's just that,
yeah, it doesn't quite make sense
in our context for that reason as well.
So the role we try to play is,
we do try to play the abstracter role,
and we do that at multiple levels.
So, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs across
a physical data center, virtual data center,
and the major clouds.
And that's an abstraction point
that we think adds value.
Because all the way back to 15 years ago,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux meant that you could run
the same application on a Dell server
or an IBM, or an HP Blade, right?
And so, we're working to apply that
at the cloud level,
certainly at the operating system level,
but, because of all the services
and the growth containers, we needed to do it
at another level, and that's what we're doing
with OpenShift.
So, OpenShift allows you to run on physical,
or on virtual in your own data center,
on the major public clouds,
and take advantages of the services underneath,
but do it in a little bit more
of an abstracted way.
>> All right.
So, we had Optum on yesterday,
who was also part of the keynote.
He's using OpenShift.
He's using AWS.
He was very excited about the opportunity
of OpenShift being able to extend
those Amazon services.
You and Andy Jassy doing a video this morning.
Give us a little bit of the inside look.
You know, how long did it take
to put this together?
My understanding, it's not shipping today,
but coming a little bit later this year.
Give us a little bit behind what happened.
>> Yeah, so.
You know, this really started off with a breakfast
Andy and I had in January, where we said,
look, our teams are working really well together,
and we've been partners since 2008,
but kind of from the bottom up,
I think we were taking very much
an incremental approach of what we could do together,
what customers we could work with.
And, I think it's a little bit in the context of
they've been out some other kind of big deals
with some other vendors,
and so, why don't we think about,
what's a true net new offering.
So let's now just talk about,
oh, running it on Amazon's lower cost.
I mean, clearly there's a cost thing there,
but, what can we do that's like, wow,
actually changes the life of some of the people
who are using our technologies.
And so what we decided is,
well, wouldn't it be amazing,
literally at breakfast we were talking about it,
if OpenShift, which is used by enterprises
all around the world, could actually leverage
the thousands of services that AWS is putting out, right?
So, right now, if you want to use all of these services,
you have to be on AWS,
which is great, but there are a lot of customers
for whatever reasons, for regulatory reasons,
or just by choice or economics, who decided
to run on-premise or elsewhere.
And so, by making those thousands of services
available, it's a win-win all around.
For Amazon, it's a ability to expose
some really amazing innovation
to many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands
of developers, and for us it's a way to expose
all this innovation to our developers,
without kind of forcing someone necessarily
to go all-in on cloud.
Now, I'll say that we were literally,
you know, Sunday night still getting
the final contract done.
>> Rebecca: (laughing)
>> But I would say, when you have a really clear,
differentiated source of value for customers,
the deal came together, I think,
relatively quickly.
>> Yeah, et cetera.
One of the things we've been trying to reconcile
a little bit is, when you talk to customers about
where their applications live,
that hybrid or multi-cloud world,
versus the offerings that are out there,
it was a mismatch, because, you know,
they were like, oh, I'm using VMware in one place,
and I'm using Amazon somewhere else.
I've got my SaaS in a different place.
We're starting to see Amazon mature
their discussion of hybrid
through partnerships of yours.
OpenShift looks like something
that can really help enable customers
to kind of get their arms around
those environments in many locations.
>> Well, I think so.
One of the things, if you really go
and talk to developers,
developers really don't care that much
about infrastructure software,
and they shouldn't care.
And, it's interesting.
I think developers right now
are really enamored by containers,
because containers somewhat makes their life easy.
But, I was talking to some of the folks
in Red Hat that deal a lot with developers,
and they say,
ultimately developers shouldn't want to care
and don't want to care about even containers.
They just want to write code,
and they want code to work, right?
And one of the cool things about OpenShift
is that's kind of what you're doing,
is you're saying write code.
Yeah, use any of the services you want
from anywhere you want to use it.
They're all there.
They're all available.
You don't have to worry about,
I want this service, so I have to run this on Amazon,
or, hey, I got my database on-premise,
so I got to run here.
Let's just make it easy.
And I think that's one of the cool things
about this announcement that's cool for developers,
but it's also unique that it's something
that only we could bring together.
>> Yeah, serverless is something that's been gaining
a lot of buzz to kind of say, right,
it's underneath there.
There's probably going to be containers,
but my people writing applications
don't want to worry about that.
Speak to, it's the application affinity
and that tie to kind of modernization
of applications that seems to be
one of the biggest challenges we've been facing
for the last couple of years.
Why are companies coming to Red Hat,
working across your solution set to help them
with that challenge of their older applications,
but also kind of building the new businesses.
>> Well I think for a couple reasons.
So first off, if we really think about
what Red Hat is, we call ourselves a software company,
but we give away all our IP, so that's a stretch, right?
>> Rebecca: (laughs)
>> You know, when we think about
our overall mission is, we think,
there's enterprise customers here
with a set of challenges,
and there's all this phenomenal innovation
happening in opensource communities.
How do we build a bridge between those.
So certainly that's product.
So we create opensource, well, products
out of opensource projects.
It's about architecture, and then it's about process.
And we talked about open innovation labs.
But in part of thinking about that's what we do,
we obviously start off say, well,
what are enterprise problems,
and what are technologies
that help solve those problems?
So, one of the things that we've driven
so hard into our container platform
is the ability to run stateful applications, right?
So it's great to talk about scale-out
and cloud native, and we certainly do that,
but go talk to any CIO and 99.9%
of their application portfolio is stateful.
And so, we think about that and we drive those needs.
And the reason we're the second largest
contributor of Kubernetes isn't just
because we're nice people.
It's because we're trying to drive
enterprise needs into these projects.
And so, I do think that technologies
that would ultimately emerge, and the products
we're able to put out, help enterprises consume
opensource in a way that is actually value adding.
>> I wanted to ask you about the examples
that you used in the keynote today.
The three that you highlighted were governance.
>> Jim: Yeah.
>> And I think that that was really interesting
because you're showing how opensource
is bringing new innovations and ideas
into government and agencies
not necessarily known for innovation.
Where do you see the future of technology
in government coming together?
>> Well, one of the reasons
I wanted to use government examples
is that I actually wanted to highlight,
well, what's the role of government
when you start thinking about innovation.
So, certainly, we could've brought up
a lot of examples.
You know, yesterday the Optum folks
that are big users of our platform,
and they've kind of created a context
for innovation among their developers.
But the reason I wanted to highlight
governments, and really try to do it from
regions around the world, was to say
there is a role for government
when you start thinking about
what is the new system underneath the economy.
So, in the 1940s and 50s in the US
the interstate highway system
was an important piece of infrastructure.
We've always thought about roads and bridges
and airports as important
for creating the underpinnings for an economy,
and that's really, really important
in a world of physical goods.
And it's not that we don't have physical goods now,
but more and more we still have to start
thinking about information assets.
And look, I've gone and seen the FCC
and advocated for net neutrality
and all that stuff.
And so, certainly broadband as a fundamental
infrastructure's important, but I think
that government plays a more important role.
Whether that's education,
and we could spend two hours on education,
but even kind of creating these contexts
where you make data available.
That's what I loved about
the British-Columbia example.
But broadly it's like, how do you create
a context for more citizen participation.
I think it's just as important
in the 21st Century as roads and bridges were
in the 20th Century.
>> Jim, you mentioned net neutrality.
I'm curious your take on just kind of the
global discussion that's going on.
A lot of your customers here are international,
you've got open communities.
The question about net neutrality, trade.
It feels like many people,
we interviews the president of ICANN
a few years ago, and was worried about,
you know, are we going to have seven internets,
not one internet, because there are certain
Asian, and even like Germany,
worried about cutting things off.
How does that impact your thinking?
Do you guys get involved in some of those
governmental discussions?
>> Well we do.
A matter of fact, we actually do have,
I'd say a small government affairs team
that advocates around these issues.
Because we see it too, even with OpenShift,
where you start saying, well,
different privacy laws in Europe versus the US,
but what if someone's running OpenShift
in Europe, but it's actually instantiated
in the US, and who can get access to what data.
Those are really, really important issues.
And it is a little bit like, you know,
we ought to pick the same railroad gauge, right?
To some extent, we need to have a set of
consistent policies, not necessarily in every area,
but enough that you can actually
have the free flow of information,
without worrying about, oh my god,
I'm exposing myself to felony privacy issues
because I'm hosting this application
on a cloud that happens to be in the US.
So there's some real issues
that we have to work through.
And they're so bleeding edge and so complex,
I'm not sure that we're quite ready
to get those done.
But these are going to be critical, critical
to the economy of the 21st Century.
>> The other thing, I can't let you go
without asking you about just
the opensource business models themself.
I've been listening to podcasts.
We had a couple of companies go IPO recently.
>> Jim: Yeah. >> They're better involved,
and they're like, oh wait,
I'm an enterprise company,
I'm a software company.
VC, you shouldn't invest in opensource
because they can't monetize what they're doing.
What's your take on the investment
and business prospect for the other companies
that are not Red Hat?
>> Well, look, I'm thrilled to see Cloudera going public.
Obviously Hortonworks public.
MuleSoft recently.
And I know some of those are hybrid models,
they have an open core,
and they have some other proprietary around it.
But look, it's still dollars
that are getting invested in opensource software
I think we've clearly proven a model
that you can have 100% opensource
and build a successful business.
For a whole set of technologies,
it's clearly a better innovation model.
The thing that I continue to push people is,
don't think about it as selling IP.
And this is, I've actually had conversations
with several university presidents
about this same issue.
University education is more about the content.
Don't be scared of MOOCs, right?
And most people kind of get that,
a university education,
yeah, content's a part of it.
But there are 50 other things
that make up an education.
So that's when I always come back
to opensource companies and say,
assume the content's free,
because it's going to be better if it's totally free.
And now think about, how do you build a model
around the fact that content's free.
And, I think education's a great one.
Your industry in media is certainly one
that needs to continue to innovate
around business models as well.
So, rather than saying,
let's take a development model
that's superior in a number of regards
for a set of technologies,
especially around infrastructure, and say,
let's hamper it, and make it work
in the old school business model.
Let's continue to work to innovate business models
that allow the innovation to happen,
because it's going to happen, right?
You do have to recognize that so much
of what you're seeing in opensource
is really a byproduct of what Google
and Facebook and others are doing.
And that's going to continue,
so the best innovation's going to come there.
You got to figure out business models that work for it.
>> You got to figure them out
Thank you so much, Jim.
Jim Whitehurst, we appreciate your time.
>> It's great to be here.
Thanks so much for having me.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman.
We will return with more from the Red Hat Summit.
(upbeat techno music)