(upbeat music)
>> Welcome back to theCUBE.
We're covering Red Hat Summit 2022.
We're going to wrap up now, Dave Vellante, Paul Gillin.
We want to introduce you to Stephanie Chan,
who's our new correspondent.
Stephanie, one of your first events,
your very first CUBE event.
So welcome.
>> Thank you.
>> Up from NYC.
Smaller event, but intimate.
You got a chance to meet some folks last night
at some of the after parties.
What are your overall impressions?
What'd you learn this week?
>> So this has been my first in-person event
in over two years.
And even though, like you said, is on the smaller scale,
roughly around 1000 attendees, versus it's usual
eight to 10,000 attendees.
There's so much energy, and excitement, and openness
in these events and sessions.
Even before and after the sessions
people have been mingling and socializing and hanging out.
So, I think a lot of people appreciate these
in-person events and are really excited to be here.
>> Cool.
So, you also sat in some of the keynotes, right?
Pretty technical, right?
Which is kind of new to sort of your genre, right?
I mean, I know you got a financial background
but, so what'd you think of the keynotes?
What'd you think of the format, the theater in the round?
Any impressions of that?
>> So, I think there's three things
that are really consistent in these Red Hat Summit keynotes.
There's always a history lesson.
There's always,
you know, emphasis in the culture of openness.
And, there's also inspirational stories
about how people utilize open source.
And I found a lot of those examples
really compelling and interesting.
For instance, people use open source in (indistinct),
and even in space.
So I really enjoyed, you know,
learning about all these different people and stories.
What about you guys?
What do you think were the big takeaways
and the best stories that came out of the keynotes?
>> Paul, want to start?
>> Clearly the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is a major rollout.
They do that only about every three years.
So that's a big deal to this audience.
I think what they did in the area of security,
with rolling out sigstore,
which is a major new, I think an important new project
that was sort of incubated at Red Hat.
And they're trying to put in
to create an open source ecosystem around that now.
And the alliances.
I'm usually not that much on partnerships,
but the Accenture and the Microsoft partnerships
do seem to be significant to the company.
And, finally, the GM partnership
which I think was maybe kind of the bombshell
that they sort of rushed in at the last minute.
But I think has the biggest potential impact
on Red Hat and its partner ecosystem
that is really going to anchor their edge architecture
going forward.
So I didn't see it so much on the product front,
but the sense of Red Hat spreading its wings,
and partnering with more companies,
and seeing its itself
as really the center of an ecosystem
indicates that they are, you know,
they're in a very solid position in their business.
>> Yeah, and also like the pandemic has really forced us
into this new normal, right?
So customer demand is changing.
There has been the shift to remote.
There's always going to be a new normal
according to Paul, and open source carries us through that.
So how do you guys think Red Hat has helped its portfolio
through this new normal and the shift?
>> I mean, when you think of Red Hat, you think of Linux.
I mean, that's where it all started.
You think OpenShift
which is the application development platforms.
Linux is the OS.
OpenShift is the application development platform
for Kubernetes.
And then of course, Ansible is the automation framework.
And I agree with you,
ecosystem is really the other piece of this.
So, I mean, I think you take those three pieces
and extend that into the open source community.
There's a lot of innovation
that's going around each of those,
but ecosystems are the key.
We heard from Stefanie Chiras,
that fundamental,
I mean, you can't do this without those gap fillers
and those partnerships.
And then another thing that's notable here is,
you know, this was,
I mean, IBM was just another brand, right?
I mean, if anything it was probably a sub-brand,
I mean, you didn't hear much about IBM.
You certainly had no IBM presence,
even though they're right across the street running Think.
No Arvind present, no keynote from Arvind,
no, you know, Big Blue washing.
And so, I think that's a testament to Arvind himself.
We heard that from Paul Cormier,
he said, hey, this guy's been great, he's left us alone.
And he's allowed us to continue innovating.
It's good news.
IBM has not polluted Red Hat.
>> Yes, I think that the Red Hat was, I said at the opening,
I think Red Hat is kind of the tail wagging the dog
right now.
And their position seems very solid in the market.
Clearly the market has come to them
in terms of their evangelism of open source.
They've remained true to their business model.
And I think that gives them credibility
that, you know, a lot of other open source companies
have lacked.
They have stuck with the plan
for over 20 years now and have really not changed it,
and it's paying off.
I think they're emerging as a company that you can trust
to do business with.
>> Now I want to throw in something else here.
I thought the conversation
with IDC analyst, Jim Mercer,
was interesting when he said that they surveyed customers
and they wanted to get the security
from their platform vendor,
versus having to buy these bespoke tools.
And it makes a lot of sense to me.
I don't think that's going to happen, right?
Because you're going to have an identity specialist.
You're going to have an endpoint specialist.
You're going to have a threat detection specialist.
And they're going to be best of breed,
you know, Red Hat's never going to be all of those things.
What they can do is partner with those companies
through APIs, through open source integrations,
they can add them in as part of the ecosystem
and maybe be the steward of that.
Maybe that's the answer.
They're never going to be the best at all those different
security disciplines.
There's no way in the world, Red Hat, that's going to happen.
But they could be the integration point.
And that would be,
that would be a simplifying layer to the equation.
>> And I think it's smart.
You know, they're not pretending to be an identity
in access management or an anti-malware company,
or even a zero trust company.
They are sticking to their knitting,
which is operating system and developers.
Evangelizing DevSecOps, which is a good thing.
And, that's what they're going to do.
You know, you have to admire this company.
It has never gotten outside of its swim lane.
I think it's understood well
really what it wants to be good at.
And, you know, in the software business
knowing what not to do is more important
than knowing what to do.
Is companies that fail
are usually the ones that get overextended,
this company has never overextended itself.
>> What else do you want to know?
>> And a term that kept popping up was multicloud,
or otherwise known as metacloud.
We know what the cloud is, but-
>> Oh, supercloud, metacloud.
>> Supercloud, yeah, here we go.
We know what the cloud is
but, what does metacloud mean to you guys?
And why has it been so popular in these conversations?
>> I'm going to boot this to Dave,
because he's the expert on this.
>> Well, expert or not, but I mean,
again, we've coined this term supercloud.
And the idea behind the supercloud
or what Ashesh called metacloud,
I like his name,
cause it allows Web 3.0 to come into the equation.
But the idea is that
instead of building on each individual cloud
and have compatibility with that cloud,
you build a layer across clouds.
So you do the hard work as a platform supplier
to hide the underlying primitives and APIs
from the end customer, or the end developer,
they can then add value on top of that.
And that abstraction layer
spans on-prem, clouds, across clouds,
ultimately out to the edge.
And it's new, a new value layer
that builds on top of the hyperscale infrastructure,
or existing data center infrastructure,
or emerging edge infrastructure.
And the reason why that is important
is because it's so damn complicated, number one.
Number two, every company's becoming a software company,
a technology company.
They're bringing their services
through digital transformation to their customers.
And you've got to have a cloud to do that.
You're not going to build your own data center.
That's like Charles Wang says,
not Charles Wang.
(Paul laughing)
Charles Phillips.
We were just talking about CA.
Charles Phillips.
Friends don't let friends build data centers.
So that supercloud concept, or what Ashesh calls metacloud,
is this new layer that's going to be powered by ecosystems
and platform companies.
And I think it's real.
I think it's-
>> And OpenShift,
OpenShift is a great,
you know, key card for them or leverage for them
because it is perhaps the best known Kubernetes platform.
And you can see here
they're really doubling down
on adding features to OpenShift,
security features, scalability.
And they see it as potentially this metacloud,
this supercloud abstraction layer.
>> And what we said is, in order to have a supercloud
you got to have a superpaz layer
and OpenShift is that superpaz layer.
>> So you had conversations
with a lot of people within the past two days.
Some people include companies,
from Verizon, Intel, Accenture.
Which conversation stood out to you the most?
>> Which, I'm sorry.
>> Which conversation stood out to you the most?
(Paul sighs)
>> The conversation with Stu Miniman was pretty interesting
because we talked about culture.
And really, he has a lot of credibility in that area
because he's not a Red Hat.
You know, he hasn't been a Red Hat forever,
he's fairly new to the company.
And got a sense from him
that the culture there really is what they say it is.
It's a culture of openness and that's, you know,
that's as important as technology for a company's success.
>> I mean, this was really good content.
I mean, there were a lot,
I mean Stefanie's awesome.
Stefanie Chiras, we're talking about the ecosystem.
Chris Wright, you know, digging into some of the CTO stuff.
Ashesh, who coined metacloud, I love that.
The whole in vehicle operating system conversation
was great.
The security discussion that we just had.
You know, the conversations with Accenture
were super thoughtful.
Of course, Paul Cormier was a highlight.
I think that one's going to be a well viewed interview,
for sure.
And, you know, I think
that the customer conversations are great.
Red Hat did a really good job
of carrying the keynote conversations,
which were abbreviated this year,
to theCUBE.
>> Right.
>> I give 'em a lot of kudos for that.
And because, theCUBE, it allows us to double click,
go deeper, peel the onion a little bit,
you know, all the buzz words, and cliches.
But it's true.
You get to clarify some of the things you heard,
which were, you know, the keynotes were, were scripted,
but tight.
And so we had some good follow up questions.
I thought it was super useful.
I know I'm leaving somebody out, but-
>> We're also able to interview representatives
from Intel and Nvidia,
which at a software conference you don't typically do.
I mean, there's the assimilation,
the combination of hardware and software.
It's very clear that, and this came out in the keynote,
that Red Hat sees hardware as matter.
It matters.
It's important again.
And it's going to be a source of innovation in the future.
That came through clearly.
>> Yeah.
The hardware matters theme,
you know, the old days you would have an operating system
and the hardware were intrinsically linked.
MVS in the mainframe,
VAX, VMS in the digital mini computers.
DG had its own operating system.
Wang had his own operating system.
Prime with Prime OS.
You remember these days?
>> Oh my God.
>> Right? (Paul laughs)
And then of course Microsoft.
>> And then x86, everything got abstracted.
>> Right.
>> Everything became x86 and now it's all atomizing again.
>> Although WinTel, right?
I mean, MS-DOS and Windows were intrinsically linked
for many, many years with Intel x86.
And it wasn't until, you know, well,
and then, you know, Sun Solaris,
but it wasn't until Linux kind of blew that apart.
And the internet is built on the lamp stack.
And of course, Linux is the fundamental foundation
for Red Hat.
So my point is, that the operating system and the hardware
have always been very closely tied together.
Whether it's security, or IO, or registries
and memory management, everything controlled by the OS
are very close to the hardware.
And so that's why I think you've got an affinity
in Red Hat to hardware.
>> But Linux is breaking that bond, don't you think?
>> Yes, but it still has to understand
the underlying hardware.
>> Right.
>> You heard today, how taking advantage of Nvidia,
and the AI capabilities.
You're seeing that with ARM,
you're seeing that with Intel.
How you can optimize the operating system to take advantage
of new generations of CPU, and NPU, and CPU,
and PU, XPU, you know, across the board.
>> Yep.
>> Well, I really enjoyed this conference
and it really stressed how important open source is
to a lot of different industries.
>> Great.
Well, thanks for coming on.
Paul, thank you.
Great co-hosting with you.
And thank you. >> Always, Dave.
>> For watching theCUBE.
We'll be on the road,
next week we're at KubeCon in Valencia, Spain.
We're at VeeamON.
We got a ton of stuff going on.
Check out thecube.net.
Check out siliconangle.com for all the news.
Wikibon.com.
We publish there weekly, our breaking analysis series.
Thanks for watching everybody.
Dave Vellante, for Paul Gillin, and Stephanie Chan.
Thanks to the crew.
Shout out, Andrew, Alex, Sonya.
Amazing job, Sonya.
Steven, thanks you guys for coming out here.
Mark, good job corresponding.
Go to SiliconANGLE, Mark's written some great stuff.
And thank you for watching.
We'll see you next time.
(calm music)