September 16, 2024 • 23 mins
It can be intimidating to dig into a new automation solution, but through Red Hat, you can learn Ansible in an afternoon, and rest assured you’re in good hands.
Shelby Skrhak speaks with Cameron Skidmore, global partner solution architect at Red Hat, about:
To join the discussion, follow us on Twitter @IngramMicroUSA #B2BTechTalk
Listen to this episode and more like it by subscribing to B2B Tech Talk on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Spreaker.
Shelby Skrhak speaks with Cameron Skidmore, global partner solution architect at Red Hat, about:
- How Red Hat forged a path of innovation
- The definition of Red Hat’s Ansible Automation platform for enterprise
- Why anyone can learn to use Ansible for enterprise
To join the discussion, follow us on Twitter @IngramMicroUSA #B2BTechTalk
Listen to this episode and more like it by subscribing to B2B Tech Talk on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Spreaker.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
You're listening to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro,
a place to learn about how to grow your business
and stay ahead of technological advances before they've become mainstream.
This episode is sponsored by ingram Micro's Expantage, the next
Level way to transform your business's potential and reshape how
customers see you through advanced transactional data.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro.
I'm your host, Shelby skirhawk Ed. Our guest today is
Cameron Skidmore, Global partner solution architect for red Hat. Cameron, welcome,
good to be here, Shelby, excellent, Well, good to have
you here today. We are talking about using red Hat
and simple Automation platform with partners to kind of help
(00:50):
automate the enterprise. But first I want to just introduce
you a little bit further and give some context here.
So Cameron, tell us about your role there at red
Hat and how you made your way there.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Sure, So I started my career out of college working
for Cisco VARs Value added reseller Partners. I mean we
were stitching together different partner technologies back in those days
and services on top of it. But then about five
years ago, I found myself at red Hat as a
global partner social architect, and during that time I've worked
with a variety of ISV partners as part of that role,
(01:24):
security partners, networking and infrastructure partners around most of our products,
so open Shift for red Hit, m Pireslanics, and then
more frequently as of late ants Ball automation platform. So
I've kind of been at a really cool point in
the industry where we've moved very heavily into cloud native
from about twenty twenty twenty nineteen when I joined red
(01:44):
hat to where we are now, and there's been some
pretty big shifts. I mean, people were talking about AI
for decades and now they have to end every sentence
with AI. So it's a bit of a change there,
but also just the way we've seen consolidations across a
ton of different types of technology on top of that.
But yeah, it's exciting to be here today in chat
about all that.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, so give that context then, so remind us twenty nineteen,
red Hat was focused on what.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
I think the big shift in those days was open
Shift was really coming into its own as a enterprise
Kubernetes product, and we were doing the shift from open
Shift three to Shift four, which was taking into consideration
the current acquisition of Coros, which is a specialized operating
(02:34):
system that we combined with our Redhea Enterprise Linux operating system,
and it really shifted open Shift into gear as a
leading Kubernetes offering for hybridcloud.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
We also it was kind of.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
The wild wilde West back then with Kubernetes offerings on
top of that. And as far as automation goes a
ton of variety in the market to you know, puppet
Chef an sipul Terraform. We're all kind of even competitors
at that point to some degree or another, and there
was a lot of variety for automation for cloud technologies
on top of that, and security and all the accessory
(03:08):
kinds of technologies that go around those, right. I have
worked with a number of different partners across all those spaces,
and in the last four or five years, a good portion,
maybe a third, have all been acquired by some bigger
fish in the industry.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
So I've seen that happen.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I've seen some smaller companies kind of either get acquired
or maybe fall out of pace because of the consolidation
and the pace that ensues on particular types of technology
and innovation. So I think that's kind of how I've
seen changes from the red hat product portfolio perspective, and
then also moving into just cloud native and automation technologies
(03:46):
consolidating their kind of presence.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
In the market.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
No, obviously you're going to have this from a red
Hat lens, But how then, at what point did red
hat become more of the the name for open open
source the way I understand it, making apps, making you know,
helping developers, just making everything work on the platform.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
So Rome's not built in today, right, and so neither
was open source or red hats position in it. I mean,
we go all the way back to the early nineties
when Weinstorevolk created his version of Linux, and then it
took off from there. But red Hat's been with that
early point of Linux and open source innovation from the beginning.
(04:33):
In those days of open source, it was primarily about Linux.
You have now seen that completely invert. The majority of
software is open source that we interact with the day,
or portions of it are. It's been a complete flipping
of that iceberg, so to speak. And then on top
of that, the cloud, and this may be is a
fact that is lost sometimes it's Linux based. Containers are
(04:54):
Linux based, the cloud runs on Kubernetes and containers.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
All that's open source technology. All that's Linux based open
source technology.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
And so red Hat kind of found itself at the
nextest point of all of that innovation, and we built
our portfolio, We incubated and supported these open source projects
from that position right from that, seeing that how all
that interrelated and where all that was going. Even ants
full automation platform was designed for Linux automation primarily when
(05:24):
it was first innovated, and we've expanded that. You can
automate Windows with it now of course too. But given
that as the center of innovation with open source and
Linux based technologies, we've kind of been able to provide
a lot of services and value to our customers who
are looking to take advantage of that innovation.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So let's give them kind of a definition a one
oh one of Antsble automation platform.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Sure, yeah, absolutely so when I say Ansphle automation platform,
I suppose I mean red Hat Anspell Automation platform. There
is an open source, open source aid WX project or
ants bull open source project that has a lot of
parity with our enterprise offering, which is AP for short,
but there's a lot of differences as well, and it
(06:10):
is very similar to the early days of Linux or
Linux even now, where of course you can just use
Linux open source Linux free Linux to run your systems
if you want, you're free to do that, and all
product work pretty darn well. But when you hit a
certain scale, when you hit a certain kind of importance
of that technology and how it's architecting the rest of
(06:31):
your technology, there are a lot of things that just
you need and at some point you need to partner
with somebody who understands the technology, who created the technology,
within the open source community, to make sure it runs smoothly.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
I rarely talk to a customer.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
I rarely talk to someone at a conference whose company
isn't already using free open source ansable in some way
or another. But what we find is that the moment
those individuals want to go from being an individual, will
you use is antsible to make their lives easier and
automate their processes and technologies to a team, that's when
(07:06):
it starts to become relevant to use the enterprise offering.
The AAP offering and we find that in order to
really scale, to do it collaboratively, and to really hit
your stride as a team securely with it, the enterprise
offering is what makes the difference for that, and the
value kind of shows itself over time. We see pretty
(07:27):
consistent adoption over time once people start to pivot to that.
And there's a whole host of things I can get
into as well. It's not just the bits that we
ship with AAP. There's an ecosystem of partners that make
it what it is. Ansable is an automation platform. After all,
without vendor technologies that we're automating, what's the darn point.
(07:48):
So the fact that we have such a buy in
across a really diverse industry at this point of players
around the networking, security hardware spaces, it goes to show
the respect that Ansable Automation platform and red Hat backing
it kind of has as that automation hub.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Well let's talk about those partners then, sure, because yeah,
you have to have something to automate. So what level
of and I guess how how broad are we talking
in terms of partners.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Networking partners particularly have always been popular with antable automation
so her Cisco's your rists security. So palow out to
cyber Arc is a particular partner that I've worked with
for a number of years. All have what we call
certified collections. So for the uninitiated, Ansable collections are a
grouping of software assets that make your life easier when
(08:37):
using Antsable. It's kind of the difference between having a
pack of Legos and then having a pack of Legos
with step by step instructions with it to build something
with it. The work and the thought and the testing
is already done in advance of you trying to use it.
With let's say a Palo Alto Networks and a red Hat,
we've already gone through the.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Steps to kind of set up that automation for you.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
We do things like create roles, which are kind of
prepackaged logic. We support the Python code that goes into
creating the automation. All of that are things that is
jointly supported between a partner like Palo Alto Networks and RedHat,
so there's no finger pointing if you open a support ticket,
which is really what it comes down to most days,
(09:22):
We're going to answer the phone and we're going to
take that phone call and help you out with the
problem that you're happy with it, and we're going to
be having Palo Alto networks on the line as needed
to to support that effort. So that is a magnitude
difference than using an open source version that's free. There's
no support, there's no phone call. You're relying on the
(09:43):
generosities of the open source community, which, while very very gracious,
aren't infinite on time. So there's a difference there. And
when you get to the point where you're really trying
to capitalize fully on automation, what you're ultimately doing is
bringing together different teams. So I mentioned networking teams are
(10:03):
networking technologies, so the networking teams have a buy into
the automation. Security teams will have a buy into to
the automation DevOps teams will have a buy into the
automation Linux administrators, and what you start ending up with
is an automation platform and automation scripts that go across teams,
which really.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Enables for innovation across those teams.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
We've been talking about AI a lot this year, but
it wasn't too long ago that the only thing anybody
wanted to talk about was DevOps right, and what is
that fundamentally but a better communication between two usually pretty
separate teams. So you'll see things now like dev scops
or net ops or things like that where this philosophy
(10:45):
is kind of carried through where you want to have
different teams in this hyper converged world where all these
technologies kind of ven diagram overlap able to communicate and
as it would happen, automation and communication and go very
much hand at hand in this way. So we've seen
that adoption journey really take place too.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Going back to the analogy of the legos, so you
can have just a pile of legos, you can have
a bag of legos with the instructions. Is there a
self self assembling you know lego Like, does it go
to the point.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Some assembly required kind of thing?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
You're right right where you know it's a one one
button type of thing.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
There a lot of the very mature antiable collections are
pretty close to plug in and go.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
They're the biggest.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
Consideration you'll need to make in a lot of times
is making sure that you're setting variables correctly. So obviously
it is a template of sorts, right, so you have
I want to do this on these let's say Cisco machines, right,
these Cisco routers and switches.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I want to do this.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Grabbing the inventories for those those Cisco devices is one
aspect to consider. Usually we also have parts of our
collections that help out with that as well.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Well.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
It's going to amplify your capabilities with antsable, right, But
ultimately you will people using antsable have to understand how
ansable works, how it functions. It's not going to be
just a click and answer thing.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
But as I was.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
Saying earlier, there's so many people who already do. There's
every single company that I talked to has at least
one or two people seemingly that are already using antsable
because it is such a powerful, easy to grasp, pick
up a ble tool, right, So it's really about amplifying
those skill sets going forward. For its part, someone who's
learned quite a few technologies in my career so far,
(12:33):
antsable was one of the most approachable. It's very human readable.
You don't need to be a programmer to use it,
as someone who's never programmed before, someone who has never
written code before or even seen YAML, yet another market
language that's used in antsable before could look at what
we call it playbook, which is the automation script. They
could look at it and pretty quickly devise what is
(12:55):
happening without.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Any formal training. It's very readable in that sense.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
And we mentioned before at the top of this to
move toward cloud native technologies and Kubernetes and containers, people
who are using those technologies containers and such are using YAMML,
yet another markup language to define what they want those
environments to look like. Anyways, so the underlying learning curve
of YAMMO at ants, which is what answell runs off of,
(13:23):
is also a skill set that carries over very nicely
when it comes to these other innovative technologies such as
containers and Kubernetes and cloud technologies. So it all kind
of melts together. We were at that nexus point, and
I think that carries over a lot in how our
technologies are organized.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I want to come to asking you like an example
of where I'd be using this, but following up on
the readable part of it and another markup language. Does
this kind of help shatter the stereotype or maybe just
the hesitation that people might have that you know, oh
read hat as Linux I've never worked at Linux. I
(14:04):
you know, it's above my head. You know that's not
something for me.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
So there's a great irony there, and it is that
one of the largest use cases for antsivile is Windows automation.
So Windows administrators are obviously, by that metric using antsable
quite a lot. And many Windows administrators have likely not
used Linux nearly as much in their careers and in
(14:27):
their past. So I think that statistic is indicative of
the approachability and the kind of universal use that ansable
can apply to that. I really think that anyone who
is no one should be intimidated by learning ansible. I
think anyone with a good concentrated mind in an afternoon
(14:48):
could start to grasp the concepts pretty quickly. I truly
believe that, especially anyone who's worked in technology generally there's
no you know very much give yourself the benefit of
the doubt there. You could definitely pick up the basics
pretty quickly and.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
So expand that, you know, give us an example of
our use case of where i'd be is, particularly using
AAP versus you know, versus the other one.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
So I'm starting off with an example for let's say
free community ansable.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
If someone's getting started.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
There, anything in your day to day that is a
repetitive task dollars to doughnuts, answable is going to be
able to save you a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
There.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
I would expand repetitive tasks to also include important tasks
because fundamentally, what you're doing with automation is declaredly stating
something as it should be. So if something has to
go a certain way, there can be no typos, there
can be no forgotten steps along the way. Antsable is
a great use case there as well. So those are
(15:51):
the two kind of starting pillars of what to automate, right,
I don't want to do this every day. I don't
want to spend thirty minutes of my morning every single
morning doing this. And I also do ever want to
do this wrong or just don't want to do this wrong.
So that would be the start point there. Where aap
where red hat ansple automation platform is going to add
a ton of value is for not just individuals doing that,
(16:14):
but organizations, organizations frankly with stakeholders right, with shareholders behind
them right, That's where it's going to start making a difference,
because you're going to start to need to use technologies
that have support, that have security patches regularly, that have
the buy in of the vendors that you are automating. Right,
(16:35):
the vendors are not going to buy into a free,
unpartnered version of it, right. They'll they'll create content, but
they're not going to pick up the phone in that respect.
This is a way to conquer those challenges quite straightforward.
So when you want to go from one person to
expanding to multiple people, that's in then organizations with money
(16:56):
at stake, that's when it's very much worth every penny.
There's a whole suite of tools that we provide and
services that we provide on top of it that make
your life easier. Innovations like advent driven antsable, So that's
a technology, for example, that will reactively automate. So when
a stimulus or an alert is triggered to antswable that
(17:18):
something has happened, it will automatically automate according to the
information that gathers about that event. So let's say there
is a vulnerability, or there is a breach or a
or let's even say that there is a failing of
some kind of system in the IT architecture, antsable can
(17:38):
automatically remediate that without a person ever knowing that it
was doing it at first, so it doesn't even wait.
At that point, that goes beyond not repeating yourself. That
goes to the point of solving problems before they happen,
which is extremely proactive use of automation.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Well, so we've talked about really kind of the value
then the automation has for or tasks that are repetitive
that you don't want to do that you have to
get correct or you're afraid human error will forget. So
let's shift to the why for the channel. So for
the partner reseller that's listening and they're using antsable, they're
(18:20):
using Cisco, but they're maybe not getting getting the full
benefit out of the Tube simply by using these these
you know, connected automations. What would you say to them?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So I work with channel partners a lot, not just
because I came from the channel in my career, right,
but I have a lot of my partners or technology partners,
but I also directly cover channel partners as well and
distribution partners. What I find in my conversations with them
constantly is that in their accounts there is a massive
(18:51):
overlap between some of our top antsible partners, so the
cyber arcs, the Cisco's, the Palo Alto Networks, Windows, Microsoft Right,
and existing answiable customers. So there is a crossing over
there that and a connection that just hasn't been made
(19:11):
on the customer side. They have two tools that are
made to work with each other and they haven't turned
on the switch yet, and that is a powerful conversation
to have to do a POC. You can just immediately
start using what's already available for you. You can immediately
start showing the value of it. And somebody somewhere has
already bought into the value of AAP because they already
have it answable as a product is made to kind
(19:34):
of grow and jump team to team over time, and
what flows with that is a bit of a culture
shift and communicating between these teams as you're all starting
to automate together, and also just a better utilization of
the products.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That you're automating. Right, You're getting more.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
Mileage out of your systems by making sure that you're
you're really running them as effectively as you can. And
that's another benefit as well, is that the value of
what you've already sold also increases over time, which in
theory should free up resources to develop that out further.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, as we do
start to wrap up our episode, we always ask our
guests the same final question. It's where do you see
technology going in the next year? So it can be
you know, specifically within this technology and I'll always caution
and say everyone groans and says you know, everyone says AI.
(20:28):
But it's like it's like water at this point, like
it's part of the it's part of the atmosphere. So
where are we going to be this time twenty twenty
five within the space in.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Twenty twenty five? Oh boy? Okay, start buying your stocks now.
I think that.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
So for the just so you know, I used to
I studied economics formally, so I'm trying to resist saying
anything about interest rates right now given the latest news,
get it to us. But I will say that I
think consolidation in the market is going to continue across
different technology verticals. I think AI might be the strange
outlier there as far as software goes, but even then
(21:11):
you're probably only going to have a few major players.
But across other things to automation technologies, developer tools. I
think that you're going to continue to see consolidation in
the market. I think those little fish you are going
to get eaten more and more by bigfish. And I
think that is going to continue into next year. I
think that will continue probably for three or four years.
I think you'll see a correction back the other way again,
(21:33):
where you have a lot of small companies come online
and do innovation. But something tells me that every VC
and has to see the word AI and what they're
about to fund for the next year or two or
they feel like their jobs are at stake. And I
think that for better for worse, that might starve some
of the other very viable and interesting technologies, and I
think the results of that will be consolidation in those markets.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It's interesting, it's a great insight.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
That's one of the one of the best answers we've
had actually for that. For listeners who have questions about
something that we talked about today, are one to find
out more? How can they reach out?
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Okay, so again, my name is Cameron's good more. I
am on LinkedIn. Of course you can reach out to
me there. You can reach out to If you're a partner,
you should have a point of contact within that as well.
You can even say to your partner contact I want
to talk to Cameron and they'll get me there. I
promise they always find a way outside of that. If
you are a customer perspective customer, reach out to your
(22:32):
account teams of course, and they will also be able
to help. You can even mention this podcast specifically and
make that account team go listen to me talk. I
would love that personally, I would too, so feel free
to do that as well.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Excellent, all right, Cameron. Well, I appreciate the time and
the insight today. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah,
it was a pleasure, and thank you listeners for tuning
in to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro.
If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and don't forget.
You can find all of these episodes on the Ingram
Micro Expantage platform. Until next time, I'm Shelby Skirhawk.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
You've been listening to B to B tech Talk by
Ingram Micro. This episode was sponsored by Ingram Micro Expantage.
B to B Tech Talk is a joint production between
Sweetfish Media and Ingram Micro to Listen to this episode
and many others. Visit ingrammicro dot com
You're listening to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro,
a place to learn about how to grow your business
and stay ahead of technological advances before they've become mainstream.
This episode is sponsored by ingram Micro's Expantage, the next
Level way to transform your business's potential and reshape how
customers see you through advanced transactional data.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro.
I'm your host, Shelby skirhawk Ed. Our guest today is
Cameron Skidmore, Global partner solution architect for red Hat. Cameron, welcome,
good to be here, Shelby, excellent, Well, good to have
you here today. We are talking about using red Hat
and simple Automation platform with partners to kind of help
(00:50):
automate the enterprise. But first I want to just introduce
you a little bit further and give some context here.
So Cameron, tell us about your role there at red
Hat and how you made your way there.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (01:01):
Sure, So I started my career out of college working
for Cisco VARs Value added reseller Partners. I mean we
were stitching together different partner technologies back in those days
and services on top of it. But then about five
years ago, I found myself at red Hat as a
global partner social architect, and during that time I've worked
with a variety of ISV partners as part of that role,
(01:24):
security partners, networking and infrastructure partners around most of our products,
so open Shift for red Hit, m Pireslanics, and then
more frequently as of late ants Ball automation platform. So
I've kind of been at a really cool point in
the industry where we've moved very heavily into cloud native
from about twenty twenty twenty nineteen when I joined red
(01:44):
hat to where we are now, and there's been some
pretty big shifts. I mean, people were talking about AI
for decades and now they have to end every sentence
with AI. So it's a bit of a change there,
but also just the way we've seen consolidations across a
ton of different types of technology on top of that.
But yeah, it's exciting to be here today in chat
about all that.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Well, so give that context then, so remind us twenty nineteen,
red Hat was focused on what.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
I think the big shift in those days was open
Shift was really coming into its own as a enterprise
Kubernetes product, and we were doing the shift from open
Shift three to Shift four, which was taking into consideration
the current acquisition of Coros, which is a specialized operating
(02:34):
system that we combined with our Redhea Enterprise Linux operating system,
and it really shifted open Shift into gear as a
leading Kubernetes offering for hybridcloud.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
We also it was kind of.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
The wild wilde West back then with Kubernetes offerings on
top of that. And as far as automation goes a
ton of variety in the market to you know, puppet
Chef an sipul Terraform. We're all kind of even competitors
at that point to some degree or another, and there
was a lot of variety for automation for cloud technologies
on top of that, and security and all the accessory
(03:08):
kinds of technologies that go around those, right. I have
worked with a number of different partners across all those spaces,
and in the last four or five years, a good portion,
maybe a third, have all been acquired by some bigger
fish in the industry.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
So I've seen that happen.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I've seen some smaller companies kind of either get acquired
or maybe fall out of pace because of the consolidation
and the pace that ensues on particular types of technology
and innovation. So I think that's kind of how I've
seen changes from the red hat product portfolio perspective, and
then also moving into just cloud native and automation technologies
(03:46):
consolidating their kind of presence.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
In the market.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
No, obviously you're going to have this from a red
Hat lens, But how then, at what point did red
hat become more of the the name for open open
source the way I understand it, making apps, making you know,
helping developers, just making everything work on the platform.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
So Rome's not built in today, right, and so neither
was open source or red hats position in it. I mean,
we go all the way back to the early nineties
when Weinstorevolk created his version of Linux, and then it
took off from there. But red Hat's been with that
early point of Linux and open source innovation from the beginning.
(04:33):
In those days of open source, it was primarily about Linux.
You have now seen that completely invert. The majority of
software is open source that we interact with the day,
or portions of it are. It's been a complete flipping
of that iceberg, so to speak. And then on top
of that, the cloud, and this may be is a
fact that is lost sometimes it's Linux based. Containers are
(04:54):
Linux based, the cloud runs on Kubernetes and containers.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
All that's open source technology. All that's Linux based open
source technology.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
And so red Hat kind of found itself at the
nextest point of all of that innovation, and we built
our portfolio, We incubated and supported these open source projects
from that position right from that, seeing that how all
that interrelated and where all that was going. Even ants
full automation platform was designed for Linux automation primarily when
(05:24):
it was first innovated, and we've expanded that. You can
automate Windows with it now of course too. But given
that as the center of innovation with open source and
Linux based technologies, we've kind of been able to provide
a lot of services and value to our customers who
are looking to take advantage of that innovation.
Speaker 3 (05:42):
So let's give them kind of a definition a one
oh one of Antsble automation platform.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Sure, yeah, absolutely so when I say Ansphle automation platform,
I suppose I mean red Hat Anspell Automation platform. There
is an open source, open source aid WX project or
ants bull open source project that has a lot of
parity with our enterprise offering, which is AP for short,
but there's a lot of differences as well, and it
(06:10):
is very similar to the early days of Linux or
Linux even now, where of course you can just use
Linux open source Linux free Linux to run your systems
if you want, you're free to do that, and all
product work pretty darn well. But when you hit a
certain scale, when you hit a certain kind of importance
of that technology and how it's architecting the rest of
(06:31):
your technology, there are a lot of things that just
you need and at some point you need to partner
with somebody who understands the technology, who created the technology,
within the open source community, to make sure it runs smoothly.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
I rarely talk to a customer.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
I rarely talk to someone at a conference whose company
isn't already using free open source ansable in some way
or another. But what we find is that the moment
those individuals want to go from being an individual, will
you use is antsible to make their lives easier and
automate their processes and technologies to a team, that's when
(07:06):
it starts to become relevant to use the enterprise offering.
The AAP offering and we find that in order to
really scale, to do it collaboratively, and to really hit
your stride as a team securely with it, the enterprise
offering is what makes the difference for that, and the
value kind of shows itself over time. We see pretty
(07:27):
consistent adoption over time once people start to pivot to that.
And there's a whole host of things I can get
into as well. It's not just the bits that we
ship with AAP. There's an ecosystem of partners that make
it what it is. Ansable is an automation platform. After all,
without vendor technologies that we're automating, what's the darn point.
(07:48):
So the fact that we have such a buy in
across a really diverse industry at this point of players
around the networking, security hardware spaces, it goes to show
the respect that Ansable Automation platform and red Hat backing
it kind of has as that automation hub.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Well let's talk about those partners then, sure, because yeah,
you have to have something to automate. So what level
of and I guess how how broad are we talking
in terms of partners.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Networking partners particularly have always been popular with antable automation
so her Cisco's your rists security. So palow out to
cyber Arc is a particular partner that I've worked with
for a number of years. All have what we call
certified collections. So for the uninitiated, Ansable collections are a
grouping of software assets that make your life easier when
(08:37):
using Antsable. It's kind of the difference between having a
pack of Legos and then having a pack of Legos
with step by step instructions with it to build something
with it. The work and the thought and the testing
is already done in advance of you trying to use it.
With let's say a Palo Alto Networks and a red Hat,
we've already gone through the.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Steps to kind of set up that automation for you.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
We do things like create roles, which are kind of
prepackaged logic. We support the Python code that goes into
creating the automation. All of that are things that is
jointly supported between a partner like Palo Alto Networks and RedHat,
so there's no finger pointing if you open a support ticket,
which is really what it comes down to most days,
(09:22):
We're going to answer the phone and we're going to
take that phone call and help you out with the
problem that you're happy with it, and we're going to
be having Palo Alto networks on the line as needed
to to support that effort. So that is a magnitude
difference than using an open source version that's free. There's
no support, there's no phone call. You're relying on the
(09:43):
generosities of the open source community, which, while very very gracious,
aren't infinite on time. So there's a difference there. And
when you get to the point where you're really trying
to capitalize fully on automation, what you're ultimately doing is
bringing together different teams. So I mentioned networking teams are
(10:03):
networking technologies, so the networking teams have a buy into
the automation. Security teams will have a buy into to
the automation DevOps teams will have a buy into the
automation Linux administrators, and what you start ending up with
is an automation platform and automation scripts that go across teams,
which really.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Enables for innovation across those teams.
Speaker 4 (10:25):
We've been talking about AI a lot this year, but
it wasn't too long ago that the only thing anybody
wanted to talk about was DevOps right, and what is
that fundamentally but a better communication between two usually pretty
separate teams. So you'll see things now like dev scops
or net ops or things like that where this philosophy
(10:45):
is kind of carried through where you want to have
different teams in this hyper converged world where all these
technologies kind of ven diagram overlap able to communicate and
as it would happen, automation and communication and go very
much hand at hand in this way. So we've seen
that adoption journey really take place too.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Going back to the analogy of the legos, so you
can have just a pile of legos, you can have
a bag of legos with the instructions. Is there a
self self assembling you know lego Like, does it go
to the point.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Some assembly required kind of thing?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
You're right right where you know it's a one one
button type of thing.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
There a lot of the very mature antiable collections are
pretty close to plug in and go.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
They're the biggest.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
Consideration you'll need to make in a lot of times
is making sure that you're setting variables correctly. So obviously
it is a template of sorts, right, so you have
I want to do this on these let's say Cisco machines, right,
these Cisco routers and switches.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
I want to do this.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
Grabbing the inventories for those those Cisco devices is one
aspect to consider. Usually we also have parts of our
collections that help out with that as well.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Well.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
It's going to amplify your capabilities with antsable, right, But
ultimately you will people using antsable have to understand how
ansable works, how it functions. It's not going to be
just a click and answer thing.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
But as I was.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
Saying earlier, there's so many people who already do. There's
every single company that I talked to has at least
one or two people seemingly that are already using antsable
because it is such a powerful, easy to grasp, pick
up a ble tool, right, So it's really about amplifying
those skill sets going forward. For its part, someone who's
learned quite a few technologies in my career so far,
(12:33):
antsable was one of the most approachable. It's very human readable.
You don't need to be a programmer to use it,
as someone who's never programmed before, someone who has never
written code before or even seen YAML, yet another market
language that's used in antsable before could look at what
we call it playbook, which is the automation script. They
could look at it and pretty quickly devise what is
(12:55):
happening without.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Any formal training. It's very readable in that sense.
Speaker 4 (12:59):
And we mentioned before at the top of this to
move toward cloud native technologies and Kubernetes and containers, people
who are using those technologies containers and such are using YAMML,
yet another markup language to define what they want those
environments to look like. Anyways, so the underlying learning curve
of YAMMO at ants, which is what answell runs off of,
(13:23):
is also a skill set that carries over very nicely
when it comes to these other innovative technologies such as
containers and Kubernetes and cloud technologies. So it all kind
of melts together. We were at that nexus point, and
I think that carries over a lot in how our
technologies are organized.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
I want to come to asking you like an example
of where I'd be using this, but following up on
the readable part of it and another markup language. Does
this kind of help shatter the stereotype or maybe just
the hesitation that people might have that you know, oh
read hat as Linux I've never worked at Linux. I
(14:04):
you know, it's above my head. You know that's not
something for me.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
So there's a great irony there, and it is that
one of the largest use cases for antsivile is Windows automation.
So Windows administrators are obviously, by that metric using antsable
quite a lot. And many Windows administrators have likely not
used Linux nearly as much in their careers and in
(14:27):
their past. So I think that statistic is indicative of
the approachability and the kind of universal use that ansable
can apply to that. I really think that anyone who
is no one should be intimidated by learning ansible. I
think anyone with a good concentrated mind in an afternoon
(14:48):
could start to grasp the concepts pretty quickly. I truly
believe that, especially anyone who's worked in technology generally there's
no you know very much give yourself the benefit of
the doubt there. You could definitely pick up the basics
pretty quickly and.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
So expand that, you know, give us an example of
our use case of where i'd be is, particularly using
AAP versus you know, versus the other one.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
So I'm starting off with an example for let's say
free community ansable.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
If someone's getting started.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
There, anything in your day to day that is a
repetitive task dollars to doughnuts, answable is going to be
able to save you a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
There.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
I would expand repetitive tasks to also include important tasks
because fundamentally, what you're doing with automation is declaredly stating
something as it should be. So if something has to
go a certain way, there can be no typos, there
can be no forgotten steps along the way. Antsable is
a great use case there as well. So those are
(15:51):
the two kind of starting pillars of what to automate, right,
I don't want to do this every day. I don't
want to spend thirty minutes of my morning every single
morning doing this. And I also do ever want to
do this wrong or just don't want to do this wrong.
So that would be the start point there. Where aap
where red hat ansple automation platform is going to add
a ton of value is for not just individuals doing that,
(16:14):
but organizations, organizations frankly with stakeholders right, with shareholders behind
them right, That's where it's going to start making a difference,
because you're going to start to need to use technologies
that have support, that have security patches regularly, that have
the buy in of the vendors that you are automating. Right,
(16:35):
the vendors are not going to buy into a free,
unpartnered version of it, right. They'll they'll create content, but
they're not going to pick up the phone in that respect.
This is a way to conquer those challenges quite straightforward.
So when you want to go from one person to
expanding to multiple people, that's in then organizations with money
(16:56):
at stake, that's when it's very much worth every penny.
There's a whole suite of tools that we provide and
services that we provide on top of it that make
your life easier. Innovations like advent driven antsable, So that's
a technology, for example, that will reactively automate. So when
a stimulus or an alert is triggered to antswable that
(17:18):
something has happened, it will automatically automate according to the
information that gathers about that event. So let's say there
is a vulnerability, or there is a breach or a
or let's even say that there is a failing of
some kind of system in the IT architecture, antsable can
(17:38):
automatically remediate that without a person ever knowing that it
was doing it at first, so it doesn't even wait.
At that point, that goes beyond not repeating yourself. That
goes to the point of solving problems before they happen,
which is extremely proactive use of automation.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Well, so we've talked about really kind of the value
then the automation has for or tasks that are repetitive
that you don't want to do that you have to
get correct or you're afraid human error will forget. So
let's shift to the why for the channel. So for
the partner reseller that's listening and they're using antsable, they're
(18:20):
using Cisco, but they're maybe not getting getting the full
benefit out of the Tube simply by using these these
you know, connected automations. What would you say to them?
Speaker 4 (18:30):
So I work with channel partners a lot, not just
because I came from the channel in my career, right,
but I have a lot of my partners or technology partners,
but I also directly cover channel partners as well and
distribution partners. What I find in my conversations with them
constantly is that in their accounts there is a massive
(18:51):
overlap between some of our top antsible partners, so the
cyber arcs, the Cisco's, the Palo Alto Networks, Windows, Microsoft Right,
and existing answiable customers. So there is a crossing over
there that and a connection that just hasn't been made
(19:11):
on the customer side. They have two tools that are
made to work with each other and they haven't turned
on the switch yet, and that is a powerful conversation
to have to do a POC. You can just immediately
start using what's already available for you. You can immediately
start showing the value of it. And somebody somewhere has
already bought into the value of AAP because they already
have it answable as a product is made to kind
(19:34):
of grow and jump team to team over time, and
what flows with that is a bit of a culture
shift and communicating between these teams as you're all starting
to automate together, and also just a better utilization of
the products.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
That you're automating. Right, You're getting more.
Speaker 4 (19:51):
Mileage out of your systems by making sure that you're
you're really running them as effectively as you can. And
that's another benefit as well, is that the value of
what you've already sold also increases over time, which in
theory should free up resources to develop that out further.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, as we do
start to wrap up our episode, we always ask our
guests the same final question. It's where do you see
technology going in the next year? So it can be
you know, specifically within this technology and I'll always caution
and say everyone groans and says you know, everyone says AI.
(20:28):
But it's like it's like water at this point, like
it's part of the it's part of the atmosphere. So
where are we going to be this time twenty twenty
five within the space in.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Twenty twenty five? Oh boy? Okay, start buying your stocks now.
I think that.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
So for the just so you know, I used to
I studied economics formally, so I'm trying to resist saying
anything about interest rates right now given the latest news,
get it to us. But I will say that I
think consolidation in the market is going to continue across
different technology verticals. I think AI might be the strange
outlier there as far as software goes, but even then
(21:11):
you're probably only going to have a few major players.
But across other things to automation technologies, developer tools. I
think that you're going to continue to see consolidation in
the market. I think those little fish you are going
to get eaten more and more by bigfish. And I
think that is going to continue into next year. I
think that will continue probably for three or four years.
I think you'll see a correction back the other way again,
(21:33):
where you have a lot of small companies come online
and do innovation. But something tells me that every VC
and has to see the word AI and what they're
about to fund for the next year or two or
they feel like their jobs are at stake. And I
think that for better for worse, that might starve some
of the other very viable and interesting technologies, and I
think the results of that will be consolidation in those markets.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
It's interesting, it's a great insight.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
That's one of the one of the best answers we've
had actually for that. For listeners who have questions about
something that we talked about today, are one to find
out more? How can they reach out?
Speaker 4 (22:10):
Okay, so again, my name is Cameron's good more. I
am on LinkedIn. Of course you can reach out to
me there. You can reach out to If you're a partner,
you should have a point of contact within that as well.
You can even say to your partner contact I want
to talk to Cameron and they'll get me there. I
promise they always find a way outside of that. If
you are a customer perspective customer, reach out to your
(22:32):
account teams of course, and they will also be able
to help. You can even mention this podcast specifically and
make that account team go listen to me talk. I
would love that personally, I would too, so feel free
to do that as well.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
Excellent, all right, Cameron. Well, I appreciate the time and
the insight today. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah,
it was a pleasure, and thank you listeners for tuning
in to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro.
If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and don't forget.
You can find all of these episodes on the Ingram
Micro Expantage platform. Until next time, I'm Shelby Skirhawk.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
You've been listening to B to B tech Talk by
Ingram Micro. This episode was sponsored by Ingram Micro Expantage.
B to B Tech Talk is a joint production between
Sweetfish Media and Ingram Micro to Listen to this episode
and many others. Visit ingrammicro dot com
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