Red Hat Summit 2024 | Mike Ferris | Red Hat

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Mike Ferris

SVP & CSO

Red Hat

Red Hat’s innovations in open-source AI: Transforming business landscapes

Red Hat Inc. has been red hot this year, with innovative product announcements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL AI and InstructLab dominating headlines.As open-source platforms, they are transforming how businesses conduct, develop and maintain artificial intelligence, further democratizing the technology and transforming business landscapes and operations, according to .“When I think about what we do as a company, it’s open source and we deliver platforms, and those are the two founding elements of any move that we make,” said Mike Ferris (pictured), senior vice president and chief strategy officer of Red Hat

play_circle_outline Analyzing Red Hat's Strategy: Insights on Recent Product Announcements, Open Source Focus, and AI Enhancements

play_circle_outline Full stack view and emphasis on efficiency

play_circle_outline Reflection on the identity and culture of Red Hat

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Mike Ferris | Red Hat

Mike Ferris

SVP & CSO Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to day two of theCube's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit, here in the Mile High City, Denver, Colorado. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, day two, the energy, we're still feeling it, we hit up the oxygen bar, we're ready to go.

>> We're ready to roll at red hot Red Hat Summit-

Rebecca Knight

>> Red hot.

>> That you coined that phrase yesterday.

Rebecca Knight

>> I know, they're going to have to trademark it, absolutely.

>> Actually, it's actually warm in here, which is a difference from other conferences. But I think we're going to keep that heat going, because I think we have an excellent guest to really talk about the strategy and the thinking, and where Red Hat is going, where it's been, how it gets to the next level.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, no one better to talk about where it's been and where it's going than Mike Ferris. He is the senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Red Hat. Thank you so much for returning to theCube.

Mike Ferris

>> Return, I'm happy to be here again. It's been a great several years, I've been with Red Hat for a long time, and this just continues it. We're really excited about the announcements we're making.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, as a Red Hat veteran, we're going to absolutely get into the history, but let's talk about the present. There are so many innovations and exciting product announcements that have happened this week, RHEL, RHEL AI, and InstructLab. From your perspective as the chief strategy officer, how do you put these particular announcements in perspective in terms of Red Hat's overall strategy and Red Hat's overall approach and philosophy?

Mike Ferris

>> Absolutely. And so, when I think about what we do as a company, it's open source and we deliver platforms, and those are the two founding elements of any move that we make. And so, when we talk about the platforms aspect here, extending what we've been doing with customers for decades now in Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, of course, automation with Ansible, into the space of AI, really means taking them on a journey from everything they've already employed, all the infrastructure they've spent, all the skills they've been developing on that, and then adding to it. We've done that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux when we added OpenShift to it, certainly OpenShift AI was an extension to Open Shift itself. And so, now, as we start talking about moving into the AI space, really taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux, releasing RHEL AI as well, really starts to extend that as well, and it really means people can take their investments they've done from the start. Meanwhile, doing all this in the open is still critical to us, it's still 100% of every motivation that we have. And so, it's been an interesting dynamic, as models have matured since, I think it was February of 2023, when Meta released their Llama models into the world, as open, not necessarily open source, but as open, it started that process, and then it just blossomed from there. And so, in partnership with IBM Research, being able to say, "Look, these Granite models, which you've held back in your proprietary products, let's take them out to market in a much more open way, have the world extend that, but then just as importantly, extend it with a community." And that's what we've really been talking about at Red Hat Summit around InstructLab, and the ability to take the knowledge and skills, just like we've been able to work with the coders and the developers in the space, extending Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora and other environments there, do so with knowledge and skills toward models, and really develop the same type of ecosystem, the same type of evolution of models, that has been in open source code for a long time. And that's, again, that concept of open source and platforms has really been driving us.

>> Yeah, I think, again, we're big believers in open, so we're on board with you. I think one of the things that I find interesting is, from a strategy perspective, you've seen it from the release one, Enterprise Linux-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> all the way up to now, and like you said, when we were talking when leading up to this, you saw it go to cloud, and you've seen it get to where it is. Now, Kubernetes is 10 years old, and people are looking at, how do we get to the next level and build these apps on top of Kubernetes and go to cloud-native? Are you seeing that the challenges of how you bring AI out, and how InstructLab with Podman, going to RHEL AI, going to OpenShift AI, how people are... You're giving them that pathway to build these applications that are composed of both models and non-model tech as part of that.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah. I'll draw some parallels as well. So obviously, virtualization is a hot topic, we can get into it or not-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> but it's a matter of saying, "Look, regardless of whether you have containerized applications or virtualized environments, you want the same platform, the same consistency, across this hybrid cloud environment, because you're going to have to make choices on where you get the best resources, how you deploy those." And so, the same thing applies to artificial intelligence into this. And so, we're now talking, and I think Chris Wright, our CTO, has spoken very eloquently about it's going to be 50% applications, 50% model-driven infrastructure in the future, so you want those two things on a similar platform, again, across this hybrid cloud. And as we talk about everything we do, I've got a chart that I use fairly often in the company that really has Enterprise Linux and Linux at the center of everything we do. And so, extending that with OpenShift AI, extending it with RHEL AI, and starting to talk about this, it's the same mechanism, giving customers something that they've started with, have been comfortable with, matured their new applications into, when we talk about virtualization and containers, now we're talking about doing the same thing with AI, and it really just extends that model.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you describe the key challenges and obstacles that your customers are facing right now, and in terms of the announcements made this week, how are you addressing those?

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah. So certainly, I've been dealing with a lot of customers this week so far, we had an executive exchange over the past day, which was great, we had about 150 customers in a room together talking about this collectively. And I'll say things like skills are still top of mind, a little bit different than it was last year, now it's about data scientists and how do we actually mature this? Safety, security, trust, these things are all core to the questions that they're asking, both for their existing infrastructure, but also, how do we move forward in the AI space? And it's that concept of applying what we've always been doing to this, things like openness is at the core of what we do, the experience that we have in decades of building enterprise open source products are now also applying to the AI space. But just as importantly, involving customers in what we're doing is critical for this. And so, that's why, when we talk about the things we do, and specifically I'll go back to InstructLab itself, being able to say, "Well, not only can an open source community contribute and work in this, and we can see what's happening, we can trust what's going in, but you yourself as a customer, when you deal with regulatory issues, and data sovereignty, and all those things you're going to have to do, you can use those same principles that are maturing in the open source realm inside your enterprise, wherever you need to do that." And so, our focus is very much to continue that same mechanism, that we build the products customers can trust in this, because we're part of a whole process, but it's ultimately up to them to understand where we fall and they fall in their governance over what they're doing and how they're managing it.

>> So I think you hit on it and so we'll go there.

Mike Ferris

>> Okay. All right.

>> Virtualization and OpenShift Virtualization, we've talked about it a little bit. Obviously, there's some licensing changes going on with VMware and others and stuff like that. How do you see this playing out? Because, again, when we take a step back from the analysis perspective and look at it, you also made some of your own changes with CentOS.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah.

>> We had Salesforce saying, "Hey, we're sticking with Red Hat, and here's why we're doing it," which I thought was a fantastic... I think they laid out, you should bottle that up, because what they said, Chris's keynote-

Mike Ferris

>> Ashesh.

>> Ashesh, yeah, Ashesh's keynote was on point about that. How do you see customers really looking at this? Because you come from an open perspective on this, and the landscape of virtualization, VMs are not going away, they're just not-

Mike Ferris

>> Absolutely not....

>> and the mainframe hasn't gone away.

Mike Ferris

>> Cobalt's still there.

>> Yes, Cobalt's still there, started out doing Cobalt too. But when you start to look at that, how do you see organizations really rationalizing this? The OpenShift Virtualization is becoming a control plane at that level, containers too.

Mike Ferris

>> So let me start with what I think has really happened, and I heard this this morning in a breakfast that I was hosting, trust has been lost, and that is going back to the foundation of when we started Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was about trust and choice. That's what we built the product on, turned it into a subscription model, we really extended that. And so, another part of my job is heavily on the business models, we talk about subscriptions and different purchasing programs that we'll produce, the guiding principle that we have in that is to make sure that we're transparent in what we do, both on the technology and on the business models, and that it also always puts Red Hat in a position that, every single day, we have to demonstrate our value to the customers. And if there isn't something that keeps you honest more than that when you're dealing with the customers, because we're always going to put the source code out, we're always going to put, in the open source AI community, we're always going to have the skills and knowledge that are out there and trying to deal with that, it's very transparent from that perspective. And so, when I heard this morning that, 'I don't trust this particular partner anymore-"

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> Our demand is, look, we're going to continue to do what we always have done, we're going to have the technologies that have matured in the open source community, that we grow into enterprise products, that we deliver that, and we may not address every single aspect of every need of every customer, but that's why we're open, because we inject our partners into the environment so that they can actually extend what we do, and so, that openness, that demand. And we also end up saying, "Look, we're going to end up giving you the choice, because we're open source, you don't have to stick with us. You still have the rights to use what you get, you're just not going to get the value of the service that we fight every day to deliver to the customers." And that's really what we're focused on.

>> Yeah. And I think what I've been hearing, just talking to other organizations as we get out and about, is that when they're looking at it, they're saying, "Okay, I've moved certain VMs over-"

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> and Goldman's here talking about it, and they were at KubeCon, I believe, as well, and we had them on there. I think when you look at this, is there a sweet spot for OpenShift Virtualization that you see right now from a use case perspective, or is it, hey, come one, come all, and bring every workload?

Mike Ferris

>> So this is also something that I want to make sure that we're clear on.

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> There will be cases that not everything can move over.

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> So the complexities of these environments vary from customer to customer. We want to be careful about that, and we will be honest with the customers-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> and engage the right partners to help in that. And we do, we have a suite of partners that will get there. But for the majority of cases, if you're looking at an environment where, one, you're looking for a way of frankly moving these VMs somewhere, and two, in the future, potentially modernizing them, putting them in the containers, go to microservices, go to cloud-native environments, we have a consistent single platform in OpenShift that provides that, that OpenShift Virt allows you to have, and it was said in the keynotes, have the VMs run right next to the containers, an amazing opportunity for you to start, and then extend going forward. And again, getting back to that fact that this is open source, it's a thing that we're going to continue to fight to show the value. We will iteratively continue to improve this, we had some announcements today about it, all those extra things we're going to put into it. And keep in mind, it also positions you for the future, because we also have OpenShift AI that is also based on this. And so, the next step in that evolution, taking the virtual machine applications, turning them into containers, microservices, breaking them apart, and then extending them with an AI infrastructure that you can actually inject the AI into those applications, we'll get back to that thing that Chris Wright said, 50% applications, 50% AI environments, that's what's really going to drive this technology of the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> So one of the big challenges that you had mentioned that customers are dealing with is skills.

Mike Ferris

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> And I'm curious to hear how you as a leader is also fostering this culture of learning and up-skilling in your organization too, because I'm imagining every technology executive is struggling with this.

Mike Ferris

>> For everyone in the industry, everyone in this building right now, it is always a challenge, not just for your teams, but for yourself. I'll say over the past year, I have spent more of my own energy investing in understanding the language of artificial intelligence and the concepts, to really start understanding not just what we're going to do, but how I get the rest of the company involved in this. And so, for my own team, very specifically, I give them videos, I start saying, "This is what we need to learn, this is where we're going as a company, and this is what it's going to mean to our customers, our partners in the market at large." It also means not just training, but also on your own effort actually experimenting. I'll tell you, I was on a plane coming to this, and I was looking at some of the other models, not Granite, but other models, trying to figure out, how do they operate, what are the limitations, what do we need to be concerned with? And I had a pretty big understanding that I hadn't expected on that plane, and all of a sudden, I'm going to go back, talk to our teams and say, "I think we need to go down this path, not just with the models, but how they're deployed." And it's that experimentation which is really at the core of what open source is really about-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> that I think is going to continue the evolution here.

>> Yeah, I think with AI, there's just no doubt that that's a good push. And I think, again, given that you look at it from a strategy view, and we talked to Chris Wright about this a little bit, was sustainability of AI-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> and being in the position that you are, give us your view on what Red Hat's view is on sustainability, and bringing that not just to AI, but infrastructure in general.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah, so I won't get into the Kepler project and the details there-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> but I think from the perspective of being able to take, especially in the AI case, looking at, instead of these monolithic very large models that are expensive, as Chris said, to build, deploy, run inference against, look at how more efficiently you can operate for specific tasks in an organization. It applies both to the AI space, but also the applications, that's the beauty of containerization as well. So being able to take that down to, how do you actually more efficiently use your resources, in the places they need to be used, with the people for the tasks that they need to be used? And it really is a overall view of how you actually engage the architects, the developers, the infrastructure managers, across the whole continuum. That's why we start talking about platform centricity, being able to say, "OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible, these are the things you center on, don't worry about how those operate underneath, because that's what we're here for. We're going to worry about the chips, we're going to worry about the efficiency of using those, how that actually gets translated into whatever you're doing above them." Before, it was applications sitting on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now, it was containers sitting on OpenShift. Now, it's going to be models sitting on RHEL AI and OpenShift AI. And it's all that full stack view, that you have choice across all of it, of course, but that stack view that allows us to get down to really focusing on where we can drive the efficiency, where we sit, and let customers focus on the application architecture, the AI architecture that they're running, truly make it work.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, last question, because I know we're running out of time here, but because you were almost there at the beginning of Red Hat-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

Rebecca Knight

>> company founded in 1993, you joined in 2000.

Mike Ferris

>> 2000, yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'd love you to just reflect a little bit on the identity and culture of Red Hat as you've seen it, and as you've progressed in your career and as the company has progressed.

Mike Ferris

>> So no doubt, when I started, and we have some of the other execs here that were here as well, we were a much smaller company, we did not have an enterprise product when I started. And it's been an amazing journey watching this, of course, we're now about 20,000 people part of IBM. What I will say though very consistently is we have stuck to our open source commitment, our roots there. And it's always a challenge to maintain that while being fiscally responsible to stockholders and shareholders, as well as the employees and our customers, because if we didn't exist, then our customers and our partners wouldn't have businesses to operate on. And so, we have to make sure that what we do there. But it's a really amazing concept internally that we are open about talking about these things, very much an open dialogue company. Much larger, it's different, it's hard to have the hallway fights, if you will, that we used to have. But it's still very much part of our core culture to really discuss things, engage, but stick to those core roots. As I said, platform centricity and open source are really driving the vast majority of what we do.

Rebecca Knight

>> Wow. Mike Ferris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a great conversation.

Mike Ferris

>> Thank you very much.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strechay, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Denver. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in tech news and analysis.

Mike Ferris | Red Hat

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to day two of theCube's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit, here in the Mile High City, Denver, Colorado. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, day two, the energy, we're still feeling it, we hit up the oxygen bar, we're ready to go.

>> We're ready to roll at red hot Red Hat Summit-

Rebecca Knight

>> Red hot.

>> That you coined that phrase yesterday.

Rebecca Knight

>> I know, they're going to have to trademark it, absolutely.

>> Actually, it's actually warm in here, which is a difference from other conferences. But I think we're going to keep that heat going, because I think we have an excellent guest to really talk about the strategy and the thinking, and where Red Hat is going, where it's been, how it gets to the next level.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, no one better to talk about where it's been and where it's going than Mike Ferris. He is the senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Red Hat. Thank you so much for returning to theCube.

Mike Ferris

>> Return, I'm happy to be here again. It's been a great several years, I've been with Red Hat for a long time, and this just continues it. We're really excited about the announcements we're making.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, as a Red Hat veteran, we're going to absolutely get into the history, but let's talk about the present. There are so many innovations and exciting product announcements that have happened this week, RHEL, RHEL AI, and InstructLab. From your perspective as the chief strategy officer, how do you put these particular announcements in perspective in terms of Red Hat's overall strategy and Red Hat's overall approach and philosophy?

Mike Ferris

>> Absolutely. And so, when I think about what we do as a company, it's open source and we deliver platforms, and those are the two founding elements of any move that we make. And so, when we talk about the platforms aspect here, extending what we've been doing with customers for decades now in Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, of course, automation with Ansible, into the space of AI, really means taking them on a journey from everything they've already employed, all the infrastructure they've spent, all the skills they've been developing on that, and then adding to it. We've done that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux when we added OpenShift to it, certainly OpenShift AI was an extension to Open Shift itself. And so, now, as we start talking about moving into the AI space, really taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux, releasing RHEL AI as well, really starts to extend that as well, and it really means people can take their investments they've done from the start. Meanwhile, doing all this in the open is still critical to us, it's still 100% of every motivation that we have. And so, it's been an interesting dynamic, as models have matured since, I think it was February of 2023, when Meta released their Llama models into the world, as open, not necessarily open source, but as open, it started that process, and then it just blossomed from there. And so, in partnership with IBM Research, being able to say, "Look, these Granite models, which you've held back in your proprietary products, let's take them out to market in a much more open way, have the world extend that, but then just as importantly, extend it with a community." And that's what we've really been talking about at Red Hat Summit around InstructLab, and the ability to take the knowledge and skills, just like we've been able to work with the coders and the developers in the space, extending Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora and other environments there, do so with knowledge and skills toward models, and really develop the same type of ecosystem, the same type of evolution of models, that has been in open source code for a long time. And that's, again, that concept of open source and platforms has really been driving us.

>> Yeah, I think, again, we're big believers in open, so we're on board with you. I think one of the things that I find interesting is, from a strategy perspective, you've seen it from the release one, Enterprise Linux-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> all the way up to now, and like you said, when we were talking when leading up to this, you saw it go to cloud, and you've seen it get to where it is. Now, Kubernetes is 10 years old, and people are looking at, how do we get to the next level and build these apps on top of Kubernetes and go to cloud-native? Are you seeing that the challenges of how you bring AI out, and how InstructLab with Podman, going to RHEL AI, going to OpenShift AI, how people are... You're giving them that pathway to build these applications that are composed of both models and non-model tech as part of that.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah. I'll draw some parallels as well. So obviously, virtualization is a hot topic, we can get into it or not-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> but it's a matter of saying, "Look, regardless of whether you have containerized applications or virtualized environments, you want the same platform, the same consistency, across this hybrid cloud environment, because you're going to have to make choices on where you get the best resources, how you deploy those." And so, the same thing applies to artificial intelligence into this. And so, we're now talking, and I think Chris Wright, our CTO, has spoken very eloquently about it's going to be 50% applications, 50% model-driven infrastructure in the future, so you want those two things on a similar platform, again, across this hybrid cloud. And as we talk about everything we do, I've got a chart that I use fairly often in the company that really has Enterprise Linux and Linux at the center of everything we do. And so, extending that with OpenShift AI, extending it with RHEL AI, and starting to talk about this, it's the same mechanism, giving customers something that they've started with, have been comfortable with, matured their new applications into, when we talk about virtualization and containers, now we're talking about doing the same thing with AI, and it really just extends that model.

>> Yeah.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you describe the key challenges and obstacles that your customers are facing right now, and in terms of the announcements made this week, how are you addressing those?

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah. So certainly, I've been dealing with a lot of customers this week so far, we had an executive exchange over the past day, which was great, we had about 150 customers in a room together talking about this collectively. And I'll say things like skills are still top of mind, a little bit different than it was last year, now it's about data scientists and how do we actually mature this? Safety, security, trust, these things are all core to the questions that they're asking, both for their existing infrastructure, but also, how do we move forward in the AI space? And it's that concept of applying what we've always been doing to this, things like openness is at the core of what we do, the experience that we have in decades of building enterprise open source products are now also applying to the AI space. But just as importantly, involving customers in what we're doing is critical for this. And so, that's why, when we talk about the things we do, and specifically I'll go back to InstructLab itself, being able to say, "Well, not only can an open source community contribute and work in this, and we can see what's happening, we can trust what's going in, but you yourself as a customer, when you deal with regulatory issues, and data sovereignty, and all those things you're going to have to do, you can use those same principles that are maturing in the open source realm inside your enterprise, wherever you need to do that." And so, our focus is very much to continue that same mechanism, that we build the products customers can trust in this, because we're part of a whole process, but it's ultimately up to them to understand where we fall and they fall in their governance over what they're doing and how they're managing it.

>> So I think you hit on it and so we'll go there.

Mike Ferris

>> Okay. All right.

>> Virtualization and OpenShift Virtualization, we've talked about it a little bit. Obviously, there's some licensing changes going on with VMware and others and stuff like that. How do you see this playing out? Because, again, when we take a step back from the analysis perspective and look at it, you also made some of your own changes with CentOS.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah.

>> We had Salesforce saying, "Hey, we're sticking with Red Hat, and here's why we're doing it," which I thought was a fantastic... I think they laid out, you should bottle that up, because what they said, Chris's keynote-

Mike Ferris

>> Ashesh.

>> Ashesh, yeah, Ashesh's keynote was on point about that. How do you see customers really looking at this? Because you come from an open perspective on this, and the landscape of virtualization, VMs are not going away, they're just not-

Mike Ferris

>> Absolutely not....

>> and the mainframe hasn't gone away.

Mike Ferris

>> Cobalt's still there.

>> Yes, Cobalt's still there, started out doing Cobalt too. But when you start to look at that, how do you see organizations really rationalizing this? The OpenShift Virtualization is becoming a control plane at that level, containers too.

Mike Ferris

>> So let me start with what I think has really happened, and I heard this this morning in a breakfast that I was hosting, trust has been lost, and that is going back to the foundation of when we started Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was about trust and choice. That's what we built the product on, turned it into a subscription model, we really extended that. And so, another part of my job is heavily on the business models, we talk about subscriptions and different purchasing programs that we'll produce, the guiding principle that we have in that is to make sure that we're transparent in what we do, both on the technology and on the business models, and that it also always puts Red Hat in a position that, every single day, we have to demonstrate our value to the customers. And if there isn't something that keeps you honest more than that when you're dealing with the customers, because we're always going to put the source code out, we're always going to put, in the open source AI community, we're always going to have the skills and knowledge that are out there and trying to deal with that, it's very transparent from that perspective. And so, when I heard this morning that, 'I don't trust this particular partner anymore-"

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> Our demand is, look, we're going to continue to do what we always have done, we're going to have the technologies that have matured in the open source community, that we grow into enterprise products, that we deliver that, and we may not address every single aspect of every need of every customer, but that's why we're open, because we inject our partners into the environment so that they can actually extend what we do, and so, that openness, that demand. And we also end up saying, "Look, we're going to end up giving you the choice, because we're open source, you don't have to stick with us. You still have the rights to use what you get, you're just not going to get the value of the service that we fight every day to deliver to the customers." And that's really what we're focused on.

>> Yeah. And I think what I've been hearing, just talking to other organizations as we get out and about, is that when they're looking at it, they're saying, "Okay, I've moved certain VMs over-"

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> and Goldman's here talking about it, and they were at KubeCon, I believe, as well, and we had them on there. I think when you look at this, is there a sweet spot for OpenShift Virtualization that you see right now from a use case perspective, or is it, hey, come one, come all, and bring every workload?

Mike Ferris

>> So this is also something that I want to make sure that we're clear on.

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> There will be cases that not everything can move over.

>> Yeah.

Mike Ferris

>> So the complexities of these environments vary from customer to customer. We want to be careful about that, and we will be honest with the customers-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> and engage the right partners to help in that. And we do, we have a suite of partners that will get there. But for the majority of cases, if you're looking at an environment where, one, you're looking for a way of frankly moving these VMs somewhere, and two, in the future, potentially modernizing them, putting them in the containers, go to microservices, go to cloud-native environments, we have a consistent single platform in OpenShift that provides that, that OpenShift Virt allows you to have, and it was said in the keynotes, have the VMs run right next to the containers, an amazing opportunity for you to start, and then extend going forward. And again, getting back to that fact that this is open source, it's a thing that we're going to continue to fight to show the value. We will iteratively continue to improve this, we had some announcements today about it, all those extra things we're going to put into it. And keep in mind, it also positions you for the future, because we also have OpenShift AI that is also based on this. And so, the next step in that evolution, taking the virtual machine applications, turning them into containers, microservices, breaking them apart, and then extending them with an AI infrastructure that you can actually inject the AI into those applications, we'll get back to that thing that Chris Wright said, 50% applications, 50% AI environments, that's what's really going to drive this technology of the future.

Rebecca Knight

>> So one of the big challenges that you had mentioned that customers are dealing with is skills.

Mike Ferris

>> Yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> And I'm curious to hear how you as a leader is also fostering this culture of learning and up-skilling in your organization too, because I'm imagining every technology executive is struggling with this.

Mike Ferris

>> For everyone in the industry, everyone in this building right now, it is always a challenge, not just for your teams, but for yourself. I'll say over the past year, I have spent more of my own energy investing in understanding the language of artificial intelligence and the concepts, to really start understanding not just what we're going to do, but how I get the rest of the company involved in this. And so, for my own team, very specifically, I give them videos, I start saying, "This is what we need to learn, this is where we're going as a company, and this is what it's going to mean to our customers, our partners in the market at large." It also means not just training, but also on your own effort actually experimenting. I'll tell you, I was on a plane coming to this, and I was looking at some of the other models, not Granite, but other models, trying to figure out, how do they operate, what are the limitations, what do we need to be concerned with? And I had a pretty big understanding that I hadn't expected on that plane, and all of a sudden, I'm going to go back, talk to our teams and say, "I think we need to go down this path, not just with the models, but how they're deployed." And it's that experimentation which is really at the core of what open source is really about-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> that I think is going to continue the evolution here.

>> Yeah, I think with AI, there's just no doubt that that's a good push. And I think, again, given that you look at it from a strategy view, and we talked to Chris Wright about this a little bit, was sustainability of AI-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

>> and being in the position that you are, give us your view on what Red Hat's view is on sustainability, and bringing that not just to AI, but infrastructure in general.

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah, so I won't get into the Kepler project and the details there-

>> Yeah....

Mike Ferris

>> but I think from the perspective of being able to take, especially in the AI case, looking at, instead of these monolithic very large models that are expensive, as Chris said, to build, deploy, run inference against, look at how more efficiently you can operate for specific tasks in an organization. It applies both to the AI space, but also the applications, that's the beauty of containerization as well. So being able to take that down to, how do you actually more efficiently use your resources, in the places they need to be used, with the people for the tasks that they need to be used? And it really is a overall view of how you actually engage the architects, the developers, the infrastructure managers, across the whole continuum. That's why we start talking about platform centricity, being able to say, "OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible, these are the things you center on, don't worry about how those operate underneath, because that's what we're here for. We're going to worry about the chips, we're going to worry about the efficiency of using those, how that actually gets translated into whatever you're doing above them." Before, it was applications sitting on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Now, it was containers sitting on OpenShift. Now, it's going to be models sitting on RHEL AI and OpenShift AI. And it's all that full stack view, that you have choice across all of it, of course, but that stack view that allows us to get down to really focusing on where we can drive the efficiency, where we sit, and let customers focus on the application architecture, the AI architecture that they're running, truly make it work.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, last question, because I know we're running out of time here, but because you were almost there at the beginning of Red Hat-

Mike Ferris

>> Yeah....

Rebecca Knight

>> company founded in 1993, you joined in 2000.

Mike Ferris

>> 2000, yes.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'd love you to just reflect a little bit on the identity and culture of Red Hat as you've seen it, and as you've progressed in your career and as the company has progressed.

Mike Ferris

>> So no doubt, when I started, and we have some of the other execs here that were here as well, we were a much smaller company, we did not have an enterprise product when I started. And it's been an amazing journey watching this, of course, we're now about 20,000 people part of IBM. What I will say though very consistently is we have stuck to our open source commitment, our roots there. And it's always a challenge to maintain that while being fiscally responsible to stockholders and shareholders, as well as the employees and our customers, because if we didn't exist, then our customers and our partners wouldn't have businesses to operate on. And so, we have to make sure that what we do there. But it's a really amazing concept internally that we are open about talking about these things, very much an open dialogue company. Much larger, it's different, it's hard to have the hallway fights, if you will, that we used to have. But it's still very much part of our core culture to really discuss things, engage, but stick to those core roots. As I said, platform centricity and open source are really driving the vast majority of what we do.

Rebecca Knight

>> Wow. Mike Ferris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a great conversation.

Mike Ferris

>> Thank you very much.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight. For Rob Strechay, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Denver. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in tech news and analysis.