PurePerformance - Dynatrace PERFORM 2019 Open Innovation with E.G. Nadhan from Redhat

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

E.G. Nadhan, Chief Technology Strategist at Red Hat, talks to us about leveraging open source innovation to maximize performance.https://twitter.com/NadhanEG

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Fear Performance! Hey everybody, welcome back to Dynatrace Perform 2019. We're in lovely Las Vegas. We've got Mark Tomlinson and James Pulley, PerfBytes, with us. And we've got a special guest today, Nadan from Red Hat. Did I get your name right? Sorry, I think I just... Yes, Nadan. You absolutely did. Perfect.

How are you? Welcome. Welcome to the airwaves. Your name. Say it. Your name. Oh. This is Brian Wilson. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Brian Wilson, yes. Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here.

Introduce yourself, Brian. Yes, I forgot. It's been a long day. So, Nadan, you're working as a chief strategist for Red Hat. That's right. But obviously you have more experience. Is this a new position that you've come to in Red Hat? Can you give us a little bit of your background? I joined Red Hat three years back in this role. And my job is to really think and act on behalf

of the customers, our customers, on what matters to them from a strategic perspective. So almost like a technical ombudsman. You could say that, except I start with the business of the customer. So where are they headed? What are their objectives? And how can they get from where they are today to where they want to go? And every company being a technology or a software company today, it doesn't matter what business you are in.

Technology has a play. So that's where we would come in, and I would work with our account teams, our customer teams on how Red Hat can be a differentiating value add and a strategic partner with our technologies for the customer to innovate their business. Okay. That's what chief strategists do. And I love my job. Yes.

Well, I get to do this podcast for Dynatrace, even though I'm on the sales side. So I love my job. Yes. Well, we, I get to do this podcast for Dynatrace even though I'm on the sales side so I love my job as well. Yeah. I hope I didn't say anything this weekend. That is awesome. And there's been some great announcements happening in the Red Hat space so things are going really well and I think

the acquisition, it was an IBM acquisition, right? So there are certain things I am not allowed to talk about because we are under a quiet period. But you're obviously referring to the announcement a few months back about IBM, yes, you know, going to acquire us. They're still going through the federal approvals, the regulatory approval period. So I would rather not talk about the acquisition itself. That's okay. You're among perf geeks here, so we're happy to talk about performance and leave the business side to the regulators.

Agreed. I will tell you this, though. It's a validation. For such an investment to be made by a company like IBM, It's a validation of open source. Exactly. So that's, I mean, I'm just saying that as an independent observer, nothing to do with the fact that I work for the acquired company. Let's talk about this. IBM was an original Unix licensee for AIX. They were part of the original lawsuits against Linux coming through SCO and things of that nature.

And so all of that has just gone by the wayside, and now Linux runs on IBM Big Iron and Red Hat Linux at that. Yes, absolutely. So that's more a testament to our partnership anyway that we have with IBM. Yep. So there's a large movement with open source here. And what are you all working on? Is there anything in terms of performance with open source here. What are you all working on? Is there anything in terms of performance with open source

or the strategies you try to help your enterprises learn or apply in the open source world? Yeah, so that's a great question, Brian. I want to kind of take a step back on how we operate in the open source community and then zero in on the response to your question. So we are a software company with an open source model. That's how I would classify us. Definitely.

We have our employees who are contributing to the open source community as lead contributors, team leads. For Kubernetes, one of the very well-known projects in the open source community, the number one contributor works for Red Hat. Oh, really? So we have employees. This is their job. This is what we do. Now, the open source community is made up of passionate programmers,

developers, engineers, architects who are, you know, it's their passion. As in, they like taking videos, watching movies, and listening to music and code. So they do it because they love, you know, that's what they want to do. Not because that's what they have to do because their leader said so, right? There is a flip side to that. Think about a retailer who is, you know, during Thanksgiving, the holiday shopping season, something fails.

They cannot wait for the open source community to fix it because they are losing shopping opportunities. They need the mission-critical applications to work. The open source community will do what they want to do when they want to do it. Exactly. What we do as Red Hat is, so there are a million projects that are going on. I call it the largest research and development labs, the R&D labs, on all the time, 24 by 7, million projects,

fail fast. Some actually see the light of day for good reason. We bring those, and we make them products with lifecycle management around it. You ask someone in the open source community, where is this particular project headed? Most likely the answer is going to be, heck if I know. I love doing this now, but let's see where it goes. But within Red Hat, it brings in the product management. We secure it. We harden it.

We add enterprise-grade functionality that is offered to customers, enterprise-grade customers. And then we actually circle it back into the community. It's not like we fork and create our own branch, so to speak. Yeah, yeah, of course. So that's the Red Hat open source model. It gives us, we don't need to have, you know, we have customer advisory councils and so on. We highly respect that. Yeah.

But to feel the pulse of where technology is headed, we rely on the open source community, right? Slack, what is being discussed there around, you know, the different projects. Yeah. And so to your point, we are seeing great traction in automation. You're seeing in containers. When we acquire companies, if they are proprietary, we turn that back into open source. If they want to stay proprietary, that's a non-starter. So that is how we augment the open source community with what used to be proprietary is now available for greater collaboration, right? No surprise that more than 70% of the enterprises have, you know,

open source software and are also contributing to the community, right? What is the biggest challenge when you're working with a customer and you're working on their strategy for incorporating innovative, this model for innovating and using open source? What are the biggest challenges they face and how do you help them? So there are two challenges, really. The first challenge is from an IT perspective. There is this mindset.

I highly respect the Googles, the Amazons, and the companies of the world where they have actually been leaders in innovating new paradigms that we are seeing adoption and so on. So due credit to them. But with due respect, there are other enterprises who think they can do it themselves. Oh, sure. Right? Now, there is a difference between being a technology company and a software company. You can, but then you really need to focus on innovating your business. If the software segment has been addressed and already available,

why should you spend cycles in doing what somebody else already has done, right? This is the classical big widget problem. Big widget decides they're going to open up bigwidget.com. They hire a bunch of employees over there, and they think, oh, we're not a widget maker. We're a technology company. No, you're a widget maker. You're big widget. Yes.

But there's this mindset change between the two sides of the company where bigwidget.com thinks, oh, we're a technology company. We don't deal with widgets. That's the other half of the company that's dirty and things of that nature. I couldn't have said it better, James. Very well said. And we run into that challenge because there is that mindset, and then they trip. It starts small, and when they try to scale, that's when, whoa, this is not working, right?

So that is one challenge that we see. The other challenge is even when they use already built software, the adoption. So it is one thing to have a container platform running in one business unit, but it's really about standardizing on it across. So they perceive different personalities and different work cultures. So how long does it take for it to go across the enterprise? So that is the other challenge that we are seeing. That's good. That's good. And particularly when you're working, I assume you have a team that sort of delivers the strategy work with them.

And what exactly do you do? Do you have sessions that discuss what their barriers are or these particular challenges? So I'm an individual contributor. Okay, great. That being said, I work with all our account execs as well as the area directors. Okay. Right? And so there are different work streams that I champion. Strategy starts at home within the account team.

Okay. I advocate you don't walk into the CIO's office and ask what keeps you awake at night. Yeah. Because that means you didn't do your job. Yeah. Right? I work with the account teams to strategize what matters to their customer. So you're kind of an internal consultant.

Starting. Yeah. I start there. Yeah, yeah. And then to deliver the message, it depends who is sitting across the table. So I focus on the retail vertical, the energy vertical. Okay. And then craft the Red Hat messaging around certain customers as to what works for you.

So you might have a dozen different customer avatars that you have different messages for. Absolutely. For the exact same technical delivery. Yes, exactly. So I work directly with the customer executives, work internally to strategize what the message is. Right. And there is an innovation stream where we partner with the customer. So we bring the customer experts into our innovation lab and we co-innovate.

We co-create. That's great. With design thinking-based sessions where we event storm and then there are use cases identified with outcomes. Because if the customer is not actually realizing outcomes for their customers, innovation is at best a technology science project, right? Yeah, yeah. The innovation lab that we offer, it actually allows the customer, the IP that comes out of that is the customer's. Yeah, absolutely. And then they get to drive their participation in the community, if they want to contribute, et cetera, with your guidance. Yes.

That's really cool. I'm also really curious, from your perspective in this role, what brings you to Dynatrace? Absolutely. So, frankly, the word that brought me here was the perform label. Yeah. So performance matters to us as red hat at from different levels so it's clearly about the application which is kind of what brought me here

number one okay and to be able to monitor the you know how is it meeting the performance metrics and you know that is clearly a key need for mission-critical applications, and more importantly, proactively take the right steps. I was fascinated by the example Walmart gave yesterday. Oh, yeah. Right? About being ahead of the game during the shopping season and then fixing the problem.

That is a fantastic example of why performance matters. So that's what brought me here. But then, from a Red Hat perspective, application software defines the brand of the enterprise, but it is more than application. It's about the infrastructure. It's about the enterprise. It goes across.

And yes, it is about the ecosystem we champion. So perform is what drew me to the conference. Highly respect what Dynatrace brings to the table. Cool. But we champion performance of the ecosystem at large, which is all about how can we make the open source community work better for our customers working with partners like Dynatrace. Yeah. We've had some great conversations with Chris Morgan, who is doing the OpenShift work, and

a couple other Red Hat people I think we've met. Were there much? There might have. And who's the gentleman from JBoss that you knew? Oh, it was Rob Greathouse. He's no longer, he was an old JBoss super performance guru guy. Yeah, but we were talking with Chris about OpenShift and with the operators allowing a lot of the ISV partners and everyone else

to really hook into and start doing things. It's highly integrated. One of the things we've been running with actually since talking with Chris is the idea of taking when you see your customers using your product in ways you didn't design it for, but in a good way. You know, like when, oh, we have an open API, you have these operators. What are your customers doing with that to elevate and do unique things

that wasn't even part of the plan, but someone said, ah, there's a great opportunity that I can do this with OpenShift or with Dynatrace or something else. And that's all part of this open source community because when you have people who are passionate, who can share ideas freely without having to worry about IP constraints, these great things can come out of it.

I would dare not dispute anything Chris Morgan said. Yeah, he's a pretty engaged guy. I respect for him. Yes. That was good. So this is your first time at Perform. Yes, it is. Yeah, and what do you think?

Just generally as a conference? I like, well, so I have been to a few conferences, you know, like Amazon, Reinvent, and, you know, NRF, National Retailers Federation and all that. Oh, yeah. And I'm bringing that into, you know, into this discussion only because I love the fact that it is in one location. I don't have to walk a whole lot. It's cozy. Yes, exactly. That's the word.

Thank you. We were actually talking about that last night, the Cosmopolitan. It's a great venue for this. Absolutely, yes. Now, that being said, I can almost talk to everyone who is at the conference. As long as they are there. It's like they are all in one place. I really like the keynotes and especially the customer panels because there is nothing like having validation from the customer that, hey, this works for us in our terms, right? I mean, quite frankly, it is good to hear from the software vendor,

but it is much better, greater, when the customer tells a story about it. And I heard of many of those directly from Kroger and from Walmart and so on. That's great. I will say the Brian Fox session, you know, that was, most of that kind of went over the head for me. He's out there. Yes, he is there. And what he talked about is also, however, I drew a parallel between the message that Brian delivered.

So here is what I took away. Yeah. You know, an interconnected world of galaxies and all that. He simplified the overall message. Yeah. To me, that's what Dynatrace does. You live in a combination of galaxies in this IT, overly complex IT

environment. With Dynatrace, you get a simplified view of what is happening where and why. For the record, we did not pay him to say that. It's a freely offered endorsement there. That is awesome. So great. Thank you very much for

sharing a few of your insights and please, hope you'll come back to perform. Hey, if you do a podcast like this again, I'll be here for you. Before we take off, how could people connect with you if they're interested? Are you on Twitter and could they ping you

directly at Red Hat? I am all over social media. So I have a LinkedIn handle. And you'll find me as EG Nadan, N-A-D-H-A-N. Yep. And my Twitter handle is N-A-D-H-A-N-E-G, Nadan EG. Nadan EG. Great. And if you just look for that on LinkedIn, I am there. Yeah. And almost I want to say between the

time I registered and now, about 50 people from Dynatrace connected with me already on LinkedIn. Good for you. Yeah, it's buzzing, as one might say. So you did say you're on social media. Are you on Snapchat? No, I'm kidding. For the kids, you know. So my kids

are the subject matter experts on that. Very good. That's awesome. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to hit the outro music here. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, thanks for taking the time to come by and chat with us. We're glad we finally got to connect.

Yes. Oh, yeah, we'll shake hands too. And people can come over to, there's a Red Hat booth right in the marketplace, just a little bit today if they want to learn. And I still see Red Hats there. There are Red Hats at Red Hat. And you are certainly welcome to join us on any future edition of Pure Performance or PerfBytes podcast.

If you have something that you'd like to talk about on the performance side, we're always open for guests. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're very welcome, Mark. Thanks for guests. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're very welcome, Mark, for joining. Brian, James, thank you.

Thank you very much.