Red Hat Summit + AnsibleFest 2025 | Andrew Randall, Microsoft

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Andrew Randall

Principal Product Manager, Office of the Chief Product Officer

Microsoft

play_circle_outline Microsoft and Red Hat partnership strengths: shared customers, technology collaboration, value delivery.

play_circle_outline Collaboration details: Azure Red Hat OpenShift, RHEL 10, AI, security, compliance.

play_circle_outline Best practices for collaborating with a technology partner: open source, exec connections, field alignment.

play_circle_outline Customer starting points with Azure and Red Hat: Azure Copilot, migration factory, landing zone.

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Andrew Randall, Microsoft

Andrew Randall

Principal Product Manager, Office of the Chief Product Officer Microsoft

Exploring Microsoft and Red Hat's Strategic Partnership at Red Hat Summit 2025

Andrew Randall, principal product manager, Office of the Chief Product Officer, at Microsoft Corp., joins theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay during Red Hat Summit 2025 to discuss the strategic partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat. Drawing from more than a decade of collaboration, Randall outlines how shared customers benefit from joint technologies such as Azure Hybrid Benefit and SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The conversation explores how Micros... Read more

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What are the reasons why the partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat feels especially relevant right now? add

What areas are Red Hat and Microsoft collaborating on at the summit and what new feature is being discussed for RHEL 10? add

What strategies have been implemented to ensure successful collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat? add

What tools and resources are available for customers looking to migrate their Red Hat estate to Azure? add

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Andrew Randall, Microsoft

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest 2025. We are in the home stretch of day one, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, what's so fun about this show is that you just really, you feel the love, the ecosystem, the partners. There's a lot of love in these companies.

Rob Strechay

>> It's especially here in the hub where we're on the floor and seeing everybody go by. But again, some great stuff being put together, solutions for these customers that are here with those partners.

Rebecca Knight

>> We've had long storied relationships. Let me introduce our next guest, Andy Randall, Principal product manager, Microsoft Azure. Thank you so much for coming back on the Andy, a CUBE alum.

Andrew Randall

>> Thank you for inviting me. It's fantastic to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we've said, Microsoft and Red Hat have been working together for many years now. What about the partnership, the relationship feels so especially relevant right now, would you say?

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah, it's actually this year represents 10 years since we really announced the strategic partnership between the two companies. I'd say there's probably three things that really make it really special. So the first is just the overlap in the customer base. If you go to pretty much any enterprise customer, chances are 9 out of 10 of them, they'll be Microsoft customers and they'll be Red Hat customers. So that means we have a shared footprint and a lot of customers that look to both companies to be working together in order to meet their needs. And that's really the second point is I think we've got very much a shared view of how we meet enterprise customers needs from the years of experience that we both have in the market. We understand human processes, how they like licensing flexibility. We have this thing called Azure Hybrid Benefit, which is really a unique capability allows customers to move between having licenses on prem and in the cloud, licensing via a pay as you go mechanism or direct with Red Hat. And that's really valuable to the procurement folks often overlooked when we have technology conversations, but actually that's just as important to the enterprise being successful and that translates into value delivery. So we did actually a study with Forrester just quite recently looked at a number of customers and they saw 192% ROI over three years on the investment that customers made in moving Red Hat workloads into Azure. So those kinds of things get the CFOs attention. And then the third is just the breadth of technology partnership that we have. Obviously we have Red Hat in Azure, but we also have Microsoft products like SQL Server run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we work on developer tools together. Just so many areas that we're actually active in together.

Rob Strechay

>> When you talked about it, you talked about meeting the customer where they're at, to a certain point. How does that work with Red Hat? Because Red Hat is, had traditionally, and isn't so much anymore, been on premises, but they have also their OpenShift in Azure and they have a number all, like you said, a wide breadth Ansible and a number of other things. How does that go with when you're working with Red Hat because it's two really powerful stories going together.

Andrew Randall

>> Absolutely, and I think that meeting the customer where they're at is something that Microsoft has traditionally done well and it's really a unique characteristic, particularly in the cloud space where there tends to be a one size fits all approach. We have a history, as well, of on-prem business, as does Red Hat. Red Hat has moved that in into the cloud. We have offerings like Azure, Red Hat, OpenShift, that was the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the cloud where Microsoft and Red Hat together offer that product to the customers. We have joined up support, so when a customer calls for support, they can raise a ticket with Microsoft, they can raise a ticket with Red Hat. On the back end, it's all connected. In fact, we even have locations where we have support engineers sitting side by side. So that relationship that they have with us, it's one where we're committed to doing what the customer needs. And I think that's something where Red Hat and Microsoft have very similar attitudes and approaches to how we're addressing customer needs.

Rebecca Knight

>> So it's interesting that you say the similar attitudes and approaches and similar ethos because the companies have very different roots. One was born in open source, the other in proprietary software. So how do you think those different mindsets, ethoses, influence the way you work together and ultimately, the experience that the customer receives on the other end?

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah, great question because, yes, Microsoft just celebrated its 50th year. You don't get to be 50 without going through a few growing stages in that time.

Rebecca Knight

>> You know something about that.

Andrew Randall

>> So yeah, I'd have to say we actually have learned a lot from Red Hat. Red Hat pioneered the enterprise open source business model. They pioneered how do you develop software in the open, put everything out there as open source, but still create a high value business where you're delivering value to customers and generating revenue and really building a business around that. So I think that we've learned from that, and if you look at our product development methodologies today, it's very much open source first things like .NET out there in open source, Virtual Studio Code, most popular IDE out there. We developed it in open source and building on products like Kubernetes where there's a community behind it and Microsoft is very, very active participant in that. We understand that open source is how customers build their applications and we're all about providing a platform that they can deliver those applications on, and that means we have to work with open source, means we have to develop with an open source first model. And so we have that mindset and yeah, it works great not just in terms of how we work with customers, but also from a collaboration perspective. When you're putting your technologies in open source, everyone can see what's there, anyone can come and contribute. And when you are talking about starting a new collaboration, there's no having to sign NDAs in exchange proprietary source code. It's right there and you can do it in the open, and that accelerates time to market, it increases trust and it also increases trust with the customers, as well, because they can see how you're working together.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think you hit on one of my favorite ones, which was when Satya came in and took over going down the open source route, one of the first things that the direction .NET, which was then called .NET Core, which was can run on Linux, and I think that was an eye-opening moment for people who had been building in the Microsoft ecosystem for so long. But now we're trying to do stuff on Linux, as well, they didn't have to leave that ecosystem of tooling and methodologies as well as skill set. There's also, you guys are bringing things like REL 10 to Azure. Talk a little bit more about some of the collaboration and innovation that's going on today, as well.

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah, so we've got collaboration across a whole number of fronts. So actually we've got quite a few joint sessions here, at the summit, which is just a testament to the work that we're doing together. So on RHEL 10 we have a joint session talking about the new image mode that's coming with RHEL 10 that allows you to repackage up the OS as an image, as a mutable image that gets deployed like a container, really. And this allows you to shift less in the development cycle where the OS gets packaged. You don't have to manage individual package updates, and it allows you to build customized images for different workloads. So we're showing this in Azure, something that you can do right now. Well, when RHEL-10 is actually released this week, but we're also working across other areas, AI, classic RHELies, have you heard of the line? So RHEL AI, which is basically foundational AI technologies on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, those will all run in the Azure environment. We have our own models like PHY, which is integrated into the Red Hat AI ecosystem. And then there's open source projects like VLLN, where you'll see Microsoft's contributed to that. We integrate it into some of the projects we work on like the open source Cato project and that's now a Red Hat project, as well, following their acquisition of Neural Magic. So a lot of different areas there where we're collaborating, as well.

Rob Strechay

>> You touched on security for a second there, and I want to address because that's why you do image mode because security and B, that shift left. What else? Because security is so top of mind with people, especially with open source and with AI, how do you see that playing together with Red Hat and Microsoft?

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah, no, there's many aspects of security, but a key one for enterprise customers is compliance. And so we actually announced at Ignite last November, we announced a new project based on, and again, open source first, we put it out in the open source called OS config, and that does compliance verification of nodes across the fleet, but also remediation, as well. And that's something we support across all the major OSes in Azure, including Red Hat. And then with something like Azure Arc, which is a technology we have that allows you to take the Azure control plane from the cloud to anywhere, so other clouds or on-prem, wherever your Red Hat enterprise Linux nodes are, that can enforce security and compliance. And we're actually working together with Red Hat on how do we identify CVEs, vulnerabilities in images, how do we canonically identify remediations for those and all of that in open with open standards.

Rebecca Knight

>> So you have a lot of overlapping customers, as we've discussed, and these customers rely on both Red Hat and Microsoft. And they also rely on the fact that there is an openness and trust and mutual respect that Microsoft and Red Hat have for each other. I'm curious, from your perspective in this ten-year milestone of your relationship, what are some best practices that you've observed that have emerged in terms of how best to collaborate with a technology partner?

Andrew Randall

>> I think there's a number of things. So first of all, we've talked about it, the more you have technologies and open source, the easier it is to collaborate and openFIRST is definitely a best practice there. And I throw another example out what we've been doing on confidential containers. So we recently announced Azure Red Hat OpenShift supports confidential containers in Azure. That was through a collaboration of the Microsoft engineering team with partners like Intel and AMD and Red Hat and upstream projects like Cata CC, and that's brought that capability, but the initial engineering wasn't really focused on let's enable this feature, it's let's build the right technology layers. So I think that's an aspect. Another is we've been having meetings here all day, we'll be having more all week, I'm sure, with different members of the Red Hat exec team, just like those regular exec connections is super important, and having exec sponsor from the Red Hat side, and exec sponsor from the Microsoft side, have them connected together and then you need to basically work at all those layers. And then the last piece I'd say is from a field motion, you can do everything from a product perspective, you can have strategies aligned, but if your field isn't aligned, then it's not going to be obvious to the customer that these are companies working together because that's who the customers are working with. So we've done a lot. In fact, I would say probably more recently, in the early days of the partnership, maybe less so, but more recently, we've done a lot more joint field engagements and working region by region to ensure that the teams understand how we're working together and that, it will then translate into what the customer's seeing from us, respectively.

Rebecca Knight

>> Getting that aligned.

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> What do you see as a good starting point for customers who are saying, hey, I'm trying to figure out XYZ use case. I'm doing a little AI, I am starting to build a Agentic, I'm doing it in a cloud-native way, but I have some SQL databases that need to be part of this because they have, if you look, 85% of data people want to use in AI is actually in databases, but still there's still a ton of SQL databases out in the world. How do you see people getting started with Azure and Red Hat to tackle those types of things? Do they come to the Azure portal? Do they go to the Red Hat? What's the best way for them to get?

Andrew Randall

>> Yeah, there's probably as many different pods as there are customers, is the short answer. Obviously within Azure we have Azure Copilot, which has access to all of the knowledge base that we have available. And so you'll often get great answers just going to Azure Copilot and saying, here's my problem, what do I do? So that's definitely a fantastic tool and they've put that out there. Obviously we have field engineering teams and we have a migration motion with customers. So we have what we call migration factory, and we have a tooling Azure Migrate that, that goes into on-premise state and we'll actually look and say, oh, you've got this database here, you can migrate that to this managed database service. You've got these VMs, here's how to bring those into Azure. And Red Hat also has teams that do that work, as well, and that's backed up with knowledge base. And we have a thing called a landing zone, which is actually a really extensive documentation with best practices on how to set up your Red Hat estate in Azure, including how to bring concepts over from on-prem into Azure or from other clouds, as well. So a lot of different tools available, a lot of it, and we invested a lot into making that a path that's proven and works for customers.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Great advice. Well, Andy, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

Andrew Randall

>> Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca Knight

>> Always a delight. I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Stretchay. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Red Hat Summit AnsibleFest 2025. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.