>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston,
it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman,
and we're here with theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020,
the global experience reaching all the participants
of the event where they are.
I'm happy to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni,
Mike Ferris, who is the Vice President of
Corporate Development and Strategy at Red Hat.
Mike, it's great to see you.
>> Like wise, Stu, happy to be here.
>> All right, so Mike, lots of things to talk about.
A few weeks back, of course,
the management changes happened,
we're fresh off of a Red Hat summit,
I had a pleasure really talking to a lot of your peers,
your new boss, and many of the customers.
But for our Think audience, bring us up to speed,
you know back in 2019 of course,
the largest software acquisition ever completed
with IBM buying Red Hat,
and there have been some management changes,
some people switching roles,
and you've got a new title.
So bring our audience up to speed.
>> Sure, absolutely.
So it's been an exciting several months
as we've gone through this of course.
We knew things were going to happen,
things were announced clearly
with Jenny's retirement quite a while ago.
But certainly the Arvind announcement,
and then as well as having both
Jim Whitehurst become President,
and Paul Cormier becoming CEO of Red Hat.
You know, it's been an exciting several months,
trying to go through this and understand, you know,
what would change, and frankly what would not change.
I'll say from Red Hat's perspective,
having been with Red Hat for, coming up here on 20 years,
not a lot is really changed.
We're still focused on our mission of being
the leading enterprise, open source software company.
Focusing on both taking our platforms,
both Red Had Enterprise Linux, and now Openshift,
forward in the market,
partnering around middleware components,
partnering around our management,
as well as our storage elements.
So, you know, our mission hasn't changed,
that's kind of one of the key aspects of this.
I'll say that certainly with Arvind now as CEO of IBM
and Jim Whitehurst as president of IBM,
along with Paul Cormier being CEO of Red Hat,
we've got a really strong leadership group
in place at IBM that understands what Red Hat is,
what we mean to the customer and just as importantly,
what we mean to the open source community.
And that type of action, and drive,
is certainly something that we think,
that leadership in place will help ensure
that the value we've delivered to customers,
frankly from day one back when
we launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux
or Red Hat Advance Server, frankly is something
that we'll be able to continue to do
and drive in the community and with the customers
as we move forward.
>> Yeah Mike, it's interesting.
When we look out on the ecosystems
and what's happening out there,
we understand for customers sometimes,
it might be challenging to say,
"Hey, I listened to 10 different vendors,
and they may all say the same words.
I've got multi hybrid, cloud, digital modernization,
things like that."
With our hat as an analyst firm, we kind of say, okay,
everybody does things a little bit different, you know,
look at the big cloud players,
they're all playing different games.
When we looked at the IBM strategy pre-acquisition
of Red Hat, and Red Hat, they line up pretty well.
You 6know, Red Hat very much it's summit
it was open hybrid cloud.
When I look at IBM, maybe a little bit more talk
of multicloud than hybrid cloud,
but hybrid has long been a piece of it.
So, you know, give us a little bit of the inside you know,
what your strategy had on it,
how much had it been strong alignment.
Obviously IBM and Red Hat had partnered for decades,
but, you know, there are some places where you need
to make sure that people understand that you know,
Red Hat still has a place and partners with all the clouds
and of course IBM has services that span many places
but they also have products
and services that are particular to IBM things.
>> Absolutely, and I think it's important to know,
and this is well established that one of
the core justifications and reasons for the acquisition
was really around Red Hats position,
not just in open source, but in hybrid cloud.
We've been talking about that for many years,
in fact before most of the vendors in the industry
picked it up, but just as importantly,
I think if you look back at Arvind Krishna's announcements
on frankly the day that he was named CEO,
he starts talking about things
like IBM's focus being hybrid and AI.
And how do those things come together and who are
the participants in that value being delivered.
Certainly from Red Hats perspective as we've said,
we've been talking about hybrid and been delivering
on hybrid for many years now,
now that's being pushed as part of the IBM overall message.
And so certainly being able to leverage that value
and extend it throughout the ecosystem that IBM brings,
throughout the software that IBM has,
and their services, you know, certainly we think we've got
a good opportunity to really take that message
much broader in the market.
You know, again with both Paul and Jim, president and CEO
of Red Hat, working together, we'll be able to take that
and leverage that capability throughout all of IBM general.
>> Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the AI piece,
'cause one of the things that really struck me at summit
is often we're talking about platforms
and we're talking about infrastructure
and while that is my background,
we understand that the reason infrastructure exists
is because (mumbles) is about application
and one of the most important piece
of applications are data,
so Red Hat of course has a strong history that ties
to applications and data, you've got an operating system
as one of the core pieces of what you're doing
and when I think about IBM and it's strengths,
well the first thing I probably think of is services,
but the second thing I think of is all
the business productivity, the databases, you know,
all these applications that IBM has created over the years.
So, I wonder if we can just click down one notch
and you talk about, you know, hybrid cloud
and AI and everything.
How are IBM and Red Hat helping customers build all
of those new applications, go through those transformation
to really be a modern enterprise?
>> So, certainly if you look at Red Hat's history,
we focused very much on building the platforms
and again, whether that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
Openshift, or Jboss, you know, our focus has been
how can we make a standardized platform that will work
across the industry regardless of use case
or industry vertical.
IBM has both platforms as well as a lot
of investment capabilities
in the higher lever value services,
as well as specializations and use of these applications
and platforms for specific vertical industries.
And a lot of what they've been able to bring
to the table with their investments in Watson and AI,
as well as a lot of their data services
has certainly started to come to fruition
and when we start taking these two in combination
and applying, for example, a focus on developers,
developer tools, being able to bring value
to not just the operations folks,
but also the developer side and really put a lot
of the AI capabilities across that,
we're starting to see accelerated value, accelerated use,
and then if you layer that on top of a hybrid approach,
you know we've got a very strong message
that crosses everything from, you know,
existing applications to new applications people
are developing, from their DevOps cycle,
all the way through the operation cycle
at the bottom end where they're trying to develop
this across multiple platforms, multiple infrastructures
and keep everything consistently managed,
secured and operated,
and that's really the overall message that we're seeing
as we talk about this together with IBM.
>> All right, so, Mike you touched on some
of the products that Red Hat offers in the portfolio.
It was a real focus at summit,
and not really to talk about the announcements.
You know, a week before summit, you know,
Relata two came out, Openshift 4.4 wasn't a big hoopla,
but you know, give us the update on really
the Red Hat portfolio and, you know,
where are those touchpoints that IBM
is helping Red Hat scale.
>> Yeah, so certainly you've touched on some of the big ones,
you know, Openshift itself, with the 4.4 release
brings a lot of new capabilities
that are being brought forward to those customers.
We have better management, better capabilities
in what they can do for monitoring service, et cetera
but certainly also things like what we're doing
with Openshift Virtualization
which was another announcement there,
where we're actually bringing a game changing capability
to the market and enabling customers
that have both existing virtualized environments
and also new or migrated or transformed
container native environments and running those on
the same platform with the same management infrastructure.
We see that as huge, to be able to simplify
the management capabilities, understand cost better
and be able to control those environments
in a much more consistent way.
Secondly, you know, one of the big things
that's been happening is really around
Advanced Container Management, or we're calling it ACM,
this is a good example of how Red Hat and IBM
have worked together to bring existing IBM capabilities
and what they had called a multi cluster management or MCM.
And bring those, not just into Red Hat as part
of our platforms but also have Red Hat take the step
of open sourcing that and making part
of the industry standard through open source communities.
So being able to take that type of value
that IBM had matured, take it through Red Hat
into the open source community but simultaneously deliver
it to our customers of Openshift
and make it part of the platform is something
we really see is a huge value add.
We're also doing a lot more with Hydrascaler's,
especially in the space of Openshift managed services.
You saw some of those last week and I would encourage
everyone to go out and look at the Paul Cormier
and Scott Guthrie announcements that we did.
There was a keynote video that you can go review.
But certainly the focus on how do we work
with these Hydrascaler's, inclusive of IBM,
to make Openshift a much more fluid deployment option,
have it more service oriented,
both on premise and off premise,
so that customers can actually work together better at it.
>> Yeah, Red Hat I thinks always done a really good job
of highlighting those partnerships, it's way easy
on the outside to talk about the competitive nature
of the industry and who fights who.
I remember a few years ago,
Red Hat made a strong partnership with AWS.
You mentioned Scott Guthrie from Microsoft,
well, you know, like it was at summit last year.
But Microsoft, long partner of course
with IBM back to the earliest days,
and with Red Hat in the much more recent days,
that there's this partnership.
So critically important, ACM definitely
an area we want to watch.
It was really a question we had had if you looked
at last year Microsoft announced Azure Arc,
that lots of solutions announced as to how am
I going to manage in this multicloud world
because it's not, my pieces everywhere,
it's now I need to mange a lot of things
that are out of my control and from different vendors
and hopefully we learned a lot of the lessons
from the multi-vendor era that will be fixed
in the multicloud era.
>> Absolutely and Arc was part of our discussion
with Scott Guthrie last week, or Paul's discussion,
you'll see a demo of that.
But I would also expect that you'll see more things coming
from us with partners as well, right,
this is about building a hybrid platform that works
in a multicloud world and being able to describe
that in a very consistent way.
Manage it, secure it and title it in a very consistent way
across all of the vendors, inclusive of both self
and managed employment options.
And so were very focused on doing that,
IBM certainly assisting in that, helping grow it.
But overall this focus is really, from Red Hat's
perspective about making that hybrid platform
the leading hybrid platform,
the leading Kubrnetes platform in the industry
and that's really where were starting from with Openshift.
>> All right, so Mike we started out the discussion
talking about some of the changes and, you know,
where Red Hat stays Red Hat
and where the company is working together.
Obviously the leadership changes were a big piece.
Congratulations, you got a new role,
I've seen quite a few people with some new titles,
you know, which is always nice to see the people
that have been working a long time.
The other area, looking from the outside,
there's a coordinated effort, is around the Covid response,
seeing the public letters from Arvind Krishna,
of course, seeing Red Hat and Paul Cormier's letter
to the employees there.
IBM was one of the first companies
that we had heard from that said
"Hey, we're not going to our same conference this year,
we're going digital with the events."
So real focus on the employees,
and then of course supporting customers.
So how does that Covid response happen
and am I right from the outside that it looks like
there is bit of a united front to help attack
this global pandemic response.
>> It is, you know, it think there's two levels to this,
certainly between Red Hat and IBM, we're well coordinated.
within Red Hat we have teams that are specially dedicated
to making sure that our associates
and more importantly our customers
and the overall communities are well served though this.
As you said, earlier in the interview,
certainly we've pulled back on any significant
product announcements at Summit,
including with some of our partners.
Merely because we wanted to maintain this focus
on how can we help everyone through
this very unfortunate experience.
And so, you know, as obviously a lot of us,
all of us are sitting at home now globally,
the focus is very much how do we stay connected,
how do we keep the business flowing
as much as possible though this and keep people safe
and secure in their environments
and make sure we serve both customers
and the associates in the best possible way.
So there's a lot of sensitivity and we want to make sure
that the industry and the overall world knows
that we're very focused on keeping people healthy
and moving forward as we work through
this together as a world.
>> Yeah, well, Mike Ferris,
thank you so much for the updates.
It has been pleasure catching up.
>> Great, thanks Stu, appreciate it.
>> All right, stay tuned from lots more coverage
from IBM Think 2020, the global digital experience.
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching.
Thank you.
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