>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts,
it's The Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
(electronic music)
>> Welcome Back to The Cube's coverage of
the Red Hat Summit, Boston, Massachusetts.
I'm your host Rebecca Knight,
along with my cohost Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Paul Cormier.
He is the executive vice president and president
of products and technologies here at Red Hat.
Thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you.
>> I want to ask you about a point
you made earlier in your keynote.
You talked about the challenges the customer is facing.
You talked about how last year the three big ones were
cost, security, and automation.
This year it's all about Cloud strategy
and about the pace of innovation.
What is driving this shift
in customer priorities and challenges?
>> I think the big thing that's driving it,
I think over the previous years,
people were really test driving
a lot of the Cloud and the hybrid technologies.
And now, as they actually start to move to the next phase
and they actually have to stitch it into their environment,
that's where we get real.
And that's actually why we see a lot of customers here
'cause that's what we've done over the last 12 to 18 months
is worked with our customers
in getting this into their environment.
Cloud as part of their IT environment
and not the entire IT environment.
So I think that's what driving it.
We're solving real world problems now,
and I think that's what we do best,
and I think that's what open source does best.
>> Paul, I thought it was a great point.
I loved to see that the Cloud strategy
was like the number one thing,
because it is what I've been hearing
when I've been talking to practitioners last year or two.
I had a T-shirt that said, Blah blah cloud,
because we spent so many years talking about it.
In the industry it's always, Oh, there's this cool new thing
and customer you need to get on it.
Now, having a Cloud strategy is critical for
any IT department to understand how they're going forward,
where they deploy resources,
where they go to their partners,
like yourself, to be able to
change and shift many of the things that they're doing.
>> Well, what we've found, even in my own shop, right,
even my own development shop, what we've found
is you had a lot of departmental groups
going out to the public Cloud.
And now you're getting,
now, because you're spending so much there
and pieces going out, now the CIO gets involved,
and now they want to look at it.
How is this going to fit into my overall strategy?
And so, at that point, the only way is hybrid.
And so, the CIO now, they don't want five islands
of different operating environments, they want one.
As a little operating group, really doesn't care,
they want their own thing,
but when the CIO's now looking
at an overall structure for the entire company,
that's what's really driving hybrid right now.
And that's really driving these implementations,
and frankly, that's what's driving a lot of the desire
to have this common operating environment
that we've been talking about for a long time.
And implementing for a long time.
>> So how do you do it?
When you talked about these five separate islands,
but those five islands now need to work together
and communicate and collaborate
and come up with a unified strategy,
how do you do it?
>> Two things.
First of all, because so much has moved to Linux,
RHEL is that platform.
The Cloud is about the application.
One of the points that I made in my keynote this morning,
kind of made it a little subtly,
so maybe it didn't come through,
we're not building infrastructure
for the sake of building infrastructure.
We're building infrastructure for the applications.
And so, that's the really important part.
The applications run on Linux, so the first step,
the first step is really getting
a common operating environment for the application.
We did that 15 years ago with RHEL.
So now, when you see RHEL on Bare Metal,
RHEL as a virtual machine on US, VMware, or Microsoft,
RHEL as a container in a private Cloud,
RHEL in one of the public guys, it's the same RHEL.
So, we do seven one or seven two,
it's seven one or seven two,
we upgrade in the same way with the same number of bits.
When we have a security update for seven two,
it's the same thing.
So now the application really with RHEL
really gets that consistency.
Then, with OpenShift now we bring the infrastructure
to maintain it, support it, deploy it, and manage it.
And so, that's what's really,
the light bulb's going on for a lot of CIO's
as they've seen OpenShift, and OpenStack as well,
because we're making this hybrid world
now manageable and secure.
But RHEL's been the key because that's the application.
That's the application layer.
Frankly, that is the piece that VMware didn't have, right?
VMware didn't have any pieces that touched the app.
Apps don't run on hypervisors, they run operating systems.
And even containers, it's just a Linux OS
sliced up in different way.
So that's really been the key.
We've been at this for 15 years.
Really, if you look at it that way,
we've evolved this over 15 years.
>> Alright, Paul you mentioned briefly in your keynote
an announcement with AWS.
I know keynote tomorrow is going to go into more detail,
but, we think it's a pretty big deal.
I've been talking to some of the press,
we talked to one of your customers, Optum,
who's one of the keynote speakers.
I mean, he said game changer.
This is, he uses Open Shift, loves what we can do this.
You were just talking about the application Affinity,
and that's what infrastructure's for.
Can you connect that with what we're talking about
with AWS here?
>> I think why this is a game changer for all of us,
and mostly the customer, is because,
prior to this, invoking an Amazon service
for an application would mean that it could only be invoked
from that infrastructure at AWS,
can only be run there, frankly.
And it really was limiting.
With now bringing the connection points back into OpenShift
the application can now invoke that Amazon service from
on Amazon, or even on Premise.
And it really extends the reach of Amazon to come in
to really now build a hybrid environment.
And I also think it's significant for our customers
telling both of us, both Red Hat and Amazon,
that they want want to run in a hybrid world.
So, that's the game changer.
It really extends both of our reaches that way
while keeping that consistent operating environment
with the RHEL base.
>> And that's different than just saying
oh, I can run a VM in an Amazon environment.
>> Right, because you're running a VM as an island.
Now, you're running an actual system
that's spanning across the hybrid world being managed
and orchestrated from one place.
>> I want to talk to you about your approach to
the product design and development process.
In the past you have talked about the virtues of patience
and how you do not build
a multi-million dollar product overnight.
It takes years.
And yet, on the other hand, there is this desire
and hunger for fast innovation and changes.
How do you strike that balance with your team
and also with customers?
>> My wife wouldn't say I had that much patience.
(laughing)
>> But at least you appreciate that it's a good thing.
>> No, I mean, frankly,
our company and even all the way to our board of directors
has been very, very supportive of that.
I mean, the first thing we do is we start and ease
up stream communities.
And really, what we are doing now is
we're really integrating multiple communities together.
When it was just the OS in the past
people used to say all the time there is no Linux community,
there's multiple communities and
our job is to bring it all together.
Right now, it's that on steroids.
We try to pick the right technologies and drive it.
I mean, I'll give you a great example.
We bought a company a few years back, Qumranet.
At the time Zen was the hyper visor,
the community was going to KVM,
we bought the company, they had zero revenue,
we had zero additional revenue because it was a hyper visor.
We bought it so we could get behind the community,
bolster it, and know it would go in the right direction.
That is the key that
no one else has really figured out,
is to place yourself in these communities over the years,
and drive it, drive it, drive it,
and then bring that innovation into a product.
I call it the difference between a project and a product.
Our products are really
an amalgamation of many communities
put together in a platform to solve a real world problem.
But you have to have the patience.
RHEL has been such a successful product for us, frankly,
it's fueled financially,
it's fueled us
and given us the ability to have the patience
for all these next generation platforms.
That's what's done it for us really.
>> Your CEO Jim Whitehurst, in his book,
talked about how from an acquisition standpoint,
everything you do, it's got to be open sourced.
Does that hamper you at all
or are there certain technology areas,
things are moving so fast, that would you buy something
and keep it internal for a while until it was open source?
How do you handle something like that?
>> The last five or six acquisitions were not open sourced,
so we open sourced them.
>> Stu: Okay.
>> It's just in our DNA, frankly,
I think it's forced us to do it the right way,
because we couldn't have a closed sourced product now
if we tried.
If Jim and I said we're going to have a closed sourced product
we'd be in the office alone.
And it's in the DNA,
and it's really forced us to build better software,
because we never ever think here's the line
and everything below is open and above is closed.
We never have to think that.
It's all open.
And it just forces that innovation.
The landscape is littered with companies
that have tried to have that line.
It just doesn't work.
You confuse your your engineers, you confuse your market,
you confuse your customers, you confuse your partners.
It's all open.
And that's what really drives the innovation.
>> Let's talk about recruitment and getting
this war for talent that we're seeing in the tech industry.
Red Hat's based in North Carolina.
You're based here in Boston.
Of course we have people here 70 different countries,
as your CEO mentioned in his opening remarks.
What are you seeing?
What are the trends?
What do the best and brightest developers
want out of an employer?
And how are you giving it to them?
>> A couple things.
Up here in Boston
the products group is headquartered up here.
Sales group is headquartered up here.
So we sort of live together.
One of the things we've just did, we just announced
we're opening an office right across the street here,
for both R&D and our customer briefing center.
So one thing is--
>> Congratulations.
We're excited for that.
Of course you'd had the Westford facility
with lots of engineers.
But Boston, a block away from where
GE's new headquarters going to be.
>> A block away.
It's about collaborating with the universities,
collaborating with the students
to come out of the universities.
I see it around the world.
No, but they want to be in the city.
>> Rebecca: Yeah.
>> They want to be in the city.
That's the first thing.
We have a thousand engineers in the Czech Republic
that are core to our product.
They build many of the products in the Czech Republic.
We're near universities.
The reason why we did Boston for the R&D is universities,
just as the Czech Republic.
Because now what's taught in engineering
and computer science programs is Linux and open source.
So when students can get out, go work for a company,
we give them the freedom to really drive where
the technology needs to go,
that's really our recruiting draw.
I would never go into our engineers and say
you will implement this this way.
They implement it the right way.
>> Rebecca: So autonomy?
>> Autonomy.
>> Rebecca: And cities.
(laughing)
>> Paul: Well, autonomy and cities in the right places.
>> Right, right.
>> We're really looking for
the talent that really wants to innovate.
And they're coming out of the universities now doing that.
So that's what's been successful for us.
>> Alright, Paul we were talking about
this is the 13th year of the show,
it's the fourth year we've done it.
The Cloud piece has really matured a lot.
If you looked forward, if we come back a year from now,
what do you kind of see as some of the major things
that we'll want to have accomplished?
What's on your plate for the next 12 months?
>> One of the things that we're looking at now,
I sort of ended it up in my keynote,
is we really think that
we've really abstracted the differences for the
application layer, storage layer, application layer,
management layer, across the hybrid world,
but there's a lot of pieces of the infrastructure
that the operations people have to deal with every day.
The network stacks, the really underneath
and the plumbing storage stacks.
Sort of the difference between OpenShift and OpenStack.
VM's being orchestrated beside containers.
So we really starting to see those pieces come together.
Really that application layer and that
infrastructure layer coming together.
We think of OpenStack as bringing the infrastructure
to the hybrid world and OpenShift as bringing
the application to the hybrid world.
Starting to bring those pieces together.
And I think that's what you'll see more of next year.
Is commonality around management, orchestration,
networking, storage, just more of that,
and more ease of plug and play.
>> Great, well Paul Cormier thank you so much for joining us.
This is Rebecca Knight along with Stu Miniman.
Thank you for joining us at Red Hat Summit 2017.
We'll be back just after this.
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