Red Hat Summit 2024 | Stefani Chiras | Red Hat

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Stefanie Chiras

Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success

Red Hat

Red Hat’s approach to placing community at the heart of AI innovation

Open-source collaboration is the core of Red Hat’s philosophy, and with its recent product announcements, having a partner ecosystem is proving to be a crucial part of their artificial intelligence strategy.“With InstructLab … partners can add in their expertise in an easy way. You don’t need a fleet of data scientists; you don’t need a lot of deep experience,” said Stefanie Chiras (pictured), senior vice president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat Inc. “They get to bring their expertise and knowledge to their customer set. To me, it opens up a whole new paradigm. To me, RHEL AI redefines what platform is in the AI era

play_circle_outline Red Hat Summit and its coverage

play_circle_outline Partnerships and ecosystem in AI

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing the Open Source Landscape: Red Hat's Groundbreaking Community-Driven Innovation, Cloud Strategy, and Partner Collaboration

play_circle_outline Red Hat's focus on interconnections and being a catalyst in the ecosystem

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Stefani Chiras | Red Hat

Stefanie Chiras

Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage three Days of Coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Denver, Colorado. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, 6,000-plus people are here and one of the things that we keep feeling and hearing about is how AI is really bringing together the partners in the ecosystem fresh from the main stage. NVIDIA, Dell, Intel, Pat Gelsinger, dialed in, beamed in. So really a lot of energy around this.

>> Again, I think the partners both throughout the ecosystem are going to be key to the success of organizations getting to their production AI. I think there's just no doubt in that they can't do it alone.

Rebecca Knight

>> And who better to talk about that than Stephanie Shearer. She's the senior vice president, Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. Thank you so much for returning to the CUBE. You're a illustrious CUBE alum.

>> I am delighted to be here, Rebecca and Rob. So great to be here and thank you for being here at Summit.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes.

>> Well, thank you for having us. I think, again, when we look at it, the energy has been great. I got to go to one of the customer excellence awards ceremony last night, and I know there's more awards to come out during the keynotes. I think what was also exciting was seeing some of the partners were in the room supporting those organizations. And I think to me that's really been, I think the story. I think we remember five years ago when cloud was going to kill off partners, and I think it's been the furthest from the truth. Now they've had to re-skill and really reassess what they do, but you guys are really giving them a path with this and really focusing in on that. And I think that was a big part of what you were talking about on stage today.

>> I mean, it's really core to our strategy at Red Hat. We have one ... We're completely focused on community. How do we create a community, a coalition of experts that come together and really drive innovation and help enterprise customers get real value from it? So that has always been part of what we have been focused on. I think one thing we're seeing as well is it is becoming a multi-partner world. And so when we come together as a community here, it's as much with us being with partners as the partners being with the other partners, and then collectively how are we talking to the customers. So great to hear that the partners were there supporting the customers winning the awards because we don't do it alone. As a platform company, we don't do it alone. Essentials are our partners.

Rebecca Knight

>> Can you talk a little bit about some of the key strategic pillars within your partners? I mean, as you said, you're working with partners, the partners are working with partners. How do you approach your strategy here?

Rebecca Knight

>> So in the ecosystem space for Red Hat, we have focused four key pillars. First off is all about cloud. IT is very important. Things like marketplace are very important. So we have focused on cloud and how do we get go to market with channel partners with distribution, really working off of that marketplace capability that a lot of our large cloud providers bring to bear for customers. Second, distribution. We've really leaned in with distribution because they drive incredible scale for a whole set of channel partners that customers depend upon. Third is about co-creation. We love to innovate. So co-creation with a line go-to-market. You've seen some of our announcements with folks like Dell, with Dell APEX Cloud platform, with Red Hat OpenShift. That brings the ability for us to integrate really our joint products with an aligned go-to-market with their channel partners, with our channel partners. And we've done a lot of things with ISVs. Being a platform company. We don't resell anyone else's technology. So we meet in the channel. We've done a lot to sort of build together those co-created offerings with ISVs, put them into the hands of distributors so they can then help their reseller partners bring that to market. So that's that co-creation space. And fourth is really about how do we work with the partner engagement experience. And we've been revamping that very much internally. I view these four pillars as foundational. When we get these right with the ecosystem, it allows us to be agile and adapt to things happening in the market as a community. Things like AI.

>> And I think AI is just expanding it. I mean, incredibly.

>> Amazing.

>> Some of the discussions, especially with the open sourcing of Granite and some the opportunities for different types of partners to get involved with that. Would seem like there are different partners to bring different pieces. How do you see those partners and what they can bring that makes them unique and brings their intellectual property to bear?

>> Yeah, so for me in ecosys, the most exciting thing about AI is it covers the entire IT stack, first off and foremost. Everything from the silicon architectures and the GPUs, and you mentioned we had Intel, NVIDIA, AMD that we're partnering with. Then you work your way up the stack, you get into the server providers, the ability to purchase a server that is built in order to run an AI operating system effectively, right? So we're working with Dell and Cisco and HPE and we pull all of that together, all the way up the stack, right into cloud areas, then into applications. I think one of the exciting things about what we announced today with RHEL AI and pulling in the Granite models, as you say, not just the model, but with InstructLab, which brings a new capability for how to tailor a model, instruction-tune a model in a very simple way, using InstructLab to tailor it, to have a real model that's built for a partner or a customer. Partners can add in their expertise in an easy way. You don't need a fleet of data scientists, you don't need a lot of deep experience. You can instruction tune that quite easily and then they get to bring their expertise and knowledge to their customer set. To me, it opens up a whole new paradigm. To me, RHEL AI redefines what platform is in the AI era.

Rebecca Knight

>> You were talking earlier about this idea of co-creation, how close are your partners working with you when you are coming up with something like InstructLab? Are they saying to you, this is what we need, this is a pain point of ours to help us figure this out together? Or do you hear their pain points and then you go off and work on it on your own?

>> Actually, I think InstructLab is a beautiful example of how we do things in the open-source way, right? Communities come up with ... and InstructLab was done jointly with academia and the open source communities where you take people who have brilliant ideas and I think once someone has an idea, it gets out into open source, it inspires new ideas and then you get partners going, Hey, you know what we could do with this? Which just kind of spirals. To me, this is the perfect example of how we work in open-source communities, what that's going to do for AI, and then we bring it to the likes of our partners like the Intels, the NVIDIAs, the Lenovos, and then we make it easy and accessible for the customers to use. It all sparks with an idea and then open source opens it up for joint community involvement and then we can't wait to talk about it with partners. And that's what I'm excited about here at Summit. With the announcements out today, already the discussions today have been, do you know what we could do with this?

>> Yeah, I can imagine because I think they look at it and go, they know that the organizations they're working with are struggling. And I think, again, we've seen it in the data that we collect from ... We have a partnership with ETR, and when we look at it, a lot of them are evaluating different use cases, be it CodeGen, which obviously the Granite open sourcing of the CodeGen part is really very interesting. I think they're also looking at things like how do we get to customer success or customer support internally with our own data that we don't really want to put out there in the public.

>> Absolutely.

>> And then they're also doing a lot of marketing content or content creation as well. Those are kind of the big three. Do you see the different partners helping, especially you brought up InstructLab about, Hey, I want to fine-tune, I'm not going to be ChatGPT, I'm not going to compete against them because that's what the organizations that you're selling to or not looking, that's not their north star. Their north star is I want my service people to be able to get the answer they need to give a better answer when somebody calls in under a minute and have that. Are you seeing that things like InstructLab, Podman, all of the way up to RHEL AI and now-

>> OpenShift....

>> tying into OpenShift AI, that ecosystem and that thread that they're pulling, are they really ... Is that the strength that you're bringing to these and they're embracing that whole?

Rebecca Knight

>> So that is exactly the intent that we're trying to do with RHEL AI and bringing in things like InstructLab. It's exactly the intent. I think we had seen partners working to really train models, which is a big heavy lift, but to train models, partners have such knowledge base. It's about how do you take that expertise. Many of them are in industry verticals. As is a good example. If you have a partner who's very strong in an industry vertical, they have a great capability to turn that into their IP in a model that has their expertise in, and then they can provide it to their customers as their expertise. But training a model is a heavy lift. I think now as we bring in capabilities like InstructLab, it sort of broadens that out. It allows partners who do have incredible knowledge around industry verticals, specific use cases. It allows them to take that, bring that into more of a tuned model, offer that to their customers. It also helps them help customers do that with their own data. And I view this as kind of a layered approach. Then you can help the customer bring in their own personal data. At this point, in a AI era, it's all about personalization. As you said, now you want your brand to stand through and shine through. If someone calls your customer support team, you want it to come through with your brand the way you want it. So it's unique experience. Now, these types of ability to train models allows companies, not massive companies, even small to mid-sized companies, be able to do that with their own personal flavor. It's huge power.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right? Not robot speak, but actually answering in the spirit and the way that the company talks.

>> Exactly right. And I think we're coming in now where for a while AI has been all about the hype. Look what can be done, but it was limited for who could actually deliver value from it. This opens up that whole world for everyone to really put it and say, yeah, this feels like my company's answer. I think that's a brilliant opportunity.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, AI is not a one-size-fits-all, we know that. And no vendor can possibly meet every customer demand or challenge or problem. How are you delivering on the choice and flexibility that customers need and require, and how does this align with the Red Hat strategy overall?

>> Yeah, I think a couple of things. We have long been working with partners on the build side for things of how do they certify to our platform, how do we support them in certifying to that platform. That is a foundational base, particularly in this space where there are new hardware needs and hardware capabilities, drivers for your GPUs, things like that. How do you pull in other partners in order to maximize the value? Folks like Run:AI, which we did a really nice announcement with, or Stability AI or Elastic. We pull in those partners on the build side to really complete that solution, and that allows, I'd say that foundational layer for how we can pull them in. Then we bring that up a level into higher levels for which partners are we working on the application side, and part of this then is how do we help everyone get and stay educated. We met with a whole set of partners yesterday. AI is moving so quickly, how do we all help one another, stay knowledgeable on the latest advancements, not only what's happening in the technology, but what each of us are doing so we can bring those value propositions together. And I think this is something quite new. We're going to have to figure out together how we keep everyone up to speed on which partners are doing what, so we can come together as a community. This is going to be a fast pace for customers and we want to come together in order to support that. One thing we did bring out, I think I've mentioned before, in prior last year, we brought in the solutions catalog for solutions where we've built things and then we provide visibility to it. We launched a specific AI grouping. We've put in a lot of new capabilities. So now when we work with those partners to have those build capabilities, there is a place for customers and channel partners to go to say, Hey, this works. We worked. We rolled up our sleeves with these other partners, this works, now I can go take that and talk to my customers. We're putting in things like demos. We're moving into that space to make it easier. This is about sharing information.

>> Yeah. And I would assume that also getting them up to speed on all of this is a huge effort because again, you're working with so many different. You brought up the ISVs that you had the announcements with. You have the hyperscalers, you have the OEMs, and then you have the chip manufacturers, and oh, by the way, then you have IBM with their models and things of that nature.

>> That's right.

>> Along with Meta and others and Stability and Mistral and all of that. So how do you help bring everybody along? How do you focus on that?

>> Yeah, I think this is going to be a whole new paradigm that we bring into it. I will say we are ... The one thing I will say: it is a focus of ours. We view this whole ecosystem as kind of a network, and we view ourselves as a catalyst being a platform company to what we're focused on is interconnections. How do we make that easier? So things like even just keeping Red Haters up to speed on all the announcements and things. We've put in a big focus on our internal enablement and making all of that available to our partners, but now, right through things like the solutions catalog, how do we make the entire ecosystem aware of not just what we are doing at Red Hat, but what we're doing with other partners who can take that to market? What use cases does that provide? I think this is going to be something new, quite honestly, in the ecosystem, but there's so much excitement around ai. We'll figure it out. Now's the time.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. Exciting times.

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stephanie Shearers, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

>> A real fun conversation.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, great to be with you here.

>> Great.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strechay, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech enterprise coverage.

Stefani Chiras | Red Hat

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage three Days of Coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Denver, Colorado. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, 6,000-plus people are here and one of the things that we keep feeling and hearing about is how AI is really bringing together the partners in the ecosystem fresh from the main stage. NVIDIA, Dell, Intel, Pat Gelsinger, dialed in, beamed in. So really a lot of energy around this.

>> Again, I think the partners both throughout the ecosystem are going to be key to the success of organizations getting to their production AI. I think there's just no doubt in that they can't do it alone.

Rebecca Knight

>> And who better to talk about that than Stephanie Shearer. She's the senior vice president, Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. Thank you so much for returning to the CUBE. You're a illustrious CUBE alum.

>> I am delighted to be here, Rebecca and Rob. So great to be here and thank you for being here at Summit.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes.

>> Well, thank you for having us. I think, again, when we look at it, the energy has been great. I got to go to one of the customer excellence awards ceremony last night, and I know there's more awards to come out during the keynotes. I think what was also exciting was seeing some of the partners were in the room supporting those organizations. And I think to me that's really been, I think the story. I think we remember five years ago when cloud was going to kill off partners, and I think it's been the furthest from the truth. Now they've had to re-skill and really reassess what they do, but you guys are really giving them a path with this and really focusing in on that. And I think that was a big part of what you were talking about on stage today.

>> I mean, it's really core to our strategy at Red Hat. We have one ... We're completely focused on community. How do we create a community, a coalition of experts that come together and really drive innovation and help enterprise customers get real value from it? So that has always been part of what we have been focused on. I think one thing we're seeing as well is it is becoming a multi-partner world. And so when we come together as a community here, it's as much with us being with partners as the partners being with the other partners, and then collectively how are we talking to the customers. So great to hear that the partners were there supporting the customers winning the awards because we don't do it alone. As a platform company, we don't do it alone. Essentials are our partners.

Rebecca Knight

>> Can you talk a little bit about some of the key strategic pillars within your partners? I mean, as you said, you're working with partners, the partners are working with partners. How do you approach your strategy here?

Rebecca Knight

>> So in the ecosystem space for Red Hat, we have focused four key pillars. First off is all about cloud. IT is very important. Things like marketplace are very important. So we have focused on cloud and how do we get go to market with channel partners with distribution, really working off of that marketplace capability that a lot of our large cloud providers bring to bear for customers. Second, distribution. We've really leaned in with distribution because they drive incredible scale for a whole set of channel partners that customers depend upon. Third is about co-creation. We love to innovate. So co-creation with a line go-to-market. You've seen some of our announcements with folks like Dell, with Dell APEX Cloud platform, with Red Hat OpenShift. That brings the ability for us to integrate really our joint products with an aligned go-to-market with their channel partners, with our channel partners. And we've done a lot of things with ISVs. Being a platform company. We don't resell anyone else's technology. So we meet in the channel. We've done a lot to sort of build together those co-created offerings with ISVs, put them into the hands of distributors so they can then help their reseller partners bring that to market. So that's that co-creation space. And fourth is really about how do we work with the partner engagement experience. And we've been revamping that very much internally. I view these four pillars as foundational. When we get these right with the ecosystem, it allows us to be agile and adapt to things happening in the market as a community. Things like AI.

>> And I think AI is just expanding it. I mean, incredibly.

>> Amazing.

>> Some of the discussions, especially with the open sourcing of Granite and some the opportunities for different types of partners to get involved with that. Would seem like there are different partners to bring different pieces. How do you see those partners and what they can bring that makes them unique and brings their intellectual property to bear?

>> Yeah, so for me in ecosys, the most exciting thing about AI is it covers the entire IT stack, first off and foremost. Everything from the silicon architectures and the GPUs, and you mentioned we had Intel, NVIDIA, AMD that we're partnering with. Then you work your way up the stack, you get into the server providers, the ability to purchase a server that is built in order to run an AI operating system effectively, right? So we're working with Dell and Cisco and HPE and we pull all of that together, all the way up the stack, right into cloud areas, then into applications. I think one of the exciting things about what we announced today with RHEL AI and pulling in the Granite models, as you say, not just the model, but with InstructLab, which brings a new capability for how to tailor a model, instruction-tune a model in a very simple way, using InstructLab to tailor it, to have a real model that's built for a partner or a customer. Partners can add in their expertise in an easy way. You don't need a fleet of data scientists, you don't need a lot of deep experience. You can instruction tune that quite easily and then they get to bring their expertise and knowledge to their customer set. To me, it opens up a whole new paradigm. To me, RHEL AI redefines what platform is in the AI era.

Rebecca Knight

>> You were talking earlier about this idea of co-creation, how close are your partners working with you when you are coming up with something like InstructLab? Are they saying to you, this is what we need, this is a pain point of ours to help us figure this out together? Or do you hear their pain points and then you go off and work on it on your own?

>> Actually, I think InstructLab is a beautiful example of how we do things in the open-source way, right? Communities come up with ... and InstructLab was done jointly with academia and the open source communities where you take people who have brilliant ideas and I think once someone has an idea, it gets out into open source, it inspires new ideas and then you get partners going, Hey, you know what we could do with this? Which just kind of spirals. To me, this is the perfect example of how we work in open-source communities, what that's going to do for AI, and then we bring it to the likes of our partners like the Intels, the NVIDIAs, the Lenovos, and then we make it easy and accessible for the customers to use. It all sparks with an idea and then open source opens it up for joint community involvement and then we can't wait to talk about it with partners. And that's what I'm excited about here at Summit. With the announcements out today, already the discussions today have been, do you know what we could do with this?

>> Yeah, I can imagine because I think they look at it and go, they know that the organizations they're working with are struggling. And I think, again, we've seen it in the data that we collect from ... We have a partnership with ETR, and when we look at it, a lot of them are evaluating different use cases, be it CodeGen, which obviously the Granite open sourcing of the CodeGen part is really very interesting. I think they're also looking at things like how do we get to customer success or customer support internally with our own data that we don't really want to put out there in the public.

>> Absolutely.

>> And then they're also doing a lot of marketing content or content creation as well. Those are kind of the big three. Do you see the different partners helping, especially you brought up InstructLab about, Hey, I want to fine-tune, I'm not going to be ChatGPT, I'm not going to compete against them because that's what the organizations that you're selling to or not looking, that's not their north star. Their north star is I want my service people to be able to get the answer they need to give a better answer when somebody calls in under a minute and have that. Are you seeing that things like InstructLab, Podman, all of the way up to RHEL AI and now-

>> OpenShift....

>> tying into OpenShift AI, that ecosystem and that thread that they're pulling, are they really ... Is that the strength that you're bringing to these and they're embracing that whole?

Rebecca Knight

>> So that is exactly the intent that we're trying to do with RHEL AI and bringing in things like InstructLab. It's exactly the intent. I think we had seen partners working to really train models, which is a big heavy lift, but to train models, partners have such knowledge base. It's about how do you take that expertise. Many of them are in industry verticals. As is a good example. If you have a partner who's very strong in an industry vertical, they have a great capability to turn that into their IP in a model that has their expertise in, and then they can provide it to their customers as their expertise. But training a model is a heavy lift. I think now as we bring in capabilities like InstructLab, it sort of broadens that out. It allows partners who do have incredible knowledge around industry verticals, specific use cases. It allows them to take that, bring that into more of a tuned model, offer that to their customers. It also helps them help customers do that with their own data. And I view this as kind of a layered approach. Then you can help the customer bring in their own personal data. At this point, in a AI era, it's all about personalization. As you said, now you want your brand to stand through and shine through. If someone calls your customer support team, you want it to come through with your brand the way you want it. So it's unique experience. Now, these types of ability to train models allows companies, not massive companies, even small to mid-sized companies, be able to do that with their own personal flavor. It's huge power.

Rebecca Knight

>> Right? Not robot speak, but actually answering in the spirit and the way that the company talks.

>> Exactly right. And I think we're coming in now where for a while AI has been all about the hype. Look what can be done, but it was limited for who could actually deliver value from it. This opens up that whole world for everyone to really put it and say, yeah, this feels like my company's answer. I think that's a brilliant opportunity.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, AI is not a one-size-fits-all, we know that. And no vendor can possibly meet every customer demand or challenge or problem. How are you delivering on the choice and flexibility that customers need and require, and how does this align with the Red Hat strategy overall?

>> Yeah, I think a couple of things. We have long been working with partners on the build side for things of how do they certify to our platform, how do we support them in certifying to that platform. That is a foundational base, particularly in this space where there are new hardware needs and hardware capabilities, drivers for your GPUs, things like that. How do you pull in other partners in order to maximize the value? Folks like Run:AI, which we did a really nice announcement with, or Stability AI or Elastic. We pull in those partners on the build side to really complete that solution, and that allows, I'd say that foundational layer for how we can pull them in. Then we bring that up a level into higher levels for which partners are we working on the application side, and part of this then is how do we help everyone get and stay educated. We met with a whole set of partners yesterday. AI is moving so quickly, how do we all help one another, stay knowledgeable on the latest advancements, not only what's happening in the technology, but what each of us are doing so we can bring those value propositions together. And I think this is something quite new. We're going to have to figure out together how we keep everyone up to speed on which partners are doing what, so we can come together as a community. This is going to be a fast pace for customers and we want to come together in order to support that. One thing we did bring out, I think I've mentioned before, in prior last year, we brought in the solutions catalog for solutions where we've built things and then we provide visibility to it. We launched a specific AI grouping. We've put in a lot of new capabilities. So now when we work with those partners to have those build capabilities, there is a place for customers and channel partners to go to say, Hey, this works. We worked. We rolled up our sleeves with these other partners, this works, now I can go take that and talk to my customers. We're putting in things like demos. We're moving into that space to make it easier. This is about sharing information.

>> Yeah. And I would assume that also getting them up to speed on all of this is a huge effort because again, you're working with so many different. You brought up the ISVs that you had the announcements with. You have the hyperscalers, you have the OEMs, and then you have the chip manufacturers, and oh, by the way, then you have IBM with their models and things of that nature.

>> That's right.

>> Along with Meta and others and Stability and Mistral and all of that. So how do you help bring everybody along? How do you focus on that?

>> Yeah, I think this is going to be a whole new paradigm that we bring into it. I will say we are ... The one thing I will say: it is a focus of ours. We view this whole ecosystem as kind of a network, and we view ourselves as a catalyst being a platform company to what we're focused on is interconnections. How do we make that easier? So things like even just keeping Red Haters up to speed on all the announcements and things. We've put in a big focus on our internal enablement and making all of that available to our partners, but now, right through things like the solutions catalog, how do we make the entire ecosystem aware of not just what we are doing at Red Hat, but what we're doing with other partners who can take that to market? What use cases does that provide? I think this is going to be something new, quite honestly, in the ecosystem, but there's so much excitement around ai. We'll figure it out. Now's the time.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. Exciting times.

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stephanie Shearers, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE.

>> A real fun conversation.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, great to be with you here.

>> Great.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strechay, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech enterprise coverage.