Sarwar Raza, Red Hat | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hi everyone. We're back here at AWS reinvent edauer texturung TV studio at the win and I would guess right now is from Red Hat.

We haven't had anybody in red hat. And this is our third day here so welcome. It's I want to introduce you tonight.

I'm gonna do my best on his name. Sarwar Raza, right they get it. Yeah.

Welcome Sarah. How are you? I'm doing I'm doing great.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. So I guess we should start with a little bit of your background or what you do at Red Hat sure.

So I am the vice president general manager for Red Hats cloud services business. So I lead our our cloud services portfolio. And you know AWS is Premier Cloud event.

We have we have lots of interesting news that we've made here. And of course meeting with with lots of our joint customers actually. Um, you know something that gets tossed around.

In Tech, especially but all over is you know, we have a special relationship, you know, my grandmother uses when they last school, which is your favorite grandchild. They're all special right? I love them all the same but but the fact of the matter is there is a special relationship with red hat and AWS.

That we were talking off camera. You mentioned it. You know when you go through I forget how many different AWS Services it is.

You don't see many other vendors named as a service because it's always an AWS service. but the open shifts are service on AWS is actually You know a joint Red Hat. Yeah it AWS service and that goes to the the depth of the relationship.

I you mentioned the 60,000 joint customers between AWS and red hat which is it's a lot of customers. Yeah, and our collaboration actually goes back, you know about 14 years starting with the availability of Reddit Enterprise Linux right as an option for your computer images and you know, it has progressed you mentioned the red hat openshift service on AWS and you know, the way I like to tell people is just go down the go down the list of services right? It's a very long list, you'll go down until you reach you know one that doesn't start with AWS or Amazon.

So again, first party natively integrated jointly engineered and supported it's something that our joint customers wanted it helps. Our red hat customers have a consistent hybrid experience across their on-premise's estate. As well as in the AWS public cloud and other public clouds that you know, we could talk about later.

Yeah, I know absolutely and that look that's the theme we've been in here on three days. Of course, we're talking a lot about AWS because we're at AWS reinvent and they are they are the largest public Cloud right here knowing I think is disputing that at this point but generally vendors such as a red hat and others, you know, they support they support Google or Microsoft to and and for good reason. So there are a number of announcements either at the show or just you know, recently and anticipation of reinvent that red hat made, you know, I don't want to tax your memory too much.

But if maybe we can go through some of the some of the bigger ones the ones you feel the most important sure. So right at right here at reinvent, we announced the general availability of our red hat openshift data science fully managed service on AWS. So this is an AI ml Ops platform that allows increased collaboration between administrators.

It Ops developers and data scientists to be able to build intelligent applications. It runs on red hat openshift on AWS, and it's also available as a Marketplace offering. So on the openshift data science capabilities, it's been in preview for a little while.

Lots of excitement from customers. And as part of the ga. We've added support for custom Jupiter images enhanced GPU support for NVIDIA gpus as well as a new integration with with academ for for lifestyle management of data pipelines, so All capabilities that allow developers and data scientists to be able to come together and and really solve solve business problems in a simple integrated environment.

As part of that I mentioned making it available in marketplace where we've also made available our red hat openshift. streams for Kafka product in Marketplace, and this follows the introduction of Red hat ansible in the AWS Market basic ansible fest last month. So you see your Trend here, right?

We have customers joint customers who are making choices about the ecosystems that they want to participate in the ecosystems that they trust for Discovery content creation and and and and support and increasingly. How they want to transact right? These marketplaces are give customers a mechanism to be able to consume committed spends with with their Cloud providers towards Solutions whether they're native Solutions or or otherwise that are listed in the marketplace.

So this is you know Red Hats commitment to making sure we can provide. Open hybrid Cloud solutions to customers in whatever way they want to consume them. Yeah.

Some point when someone writes like the history of AWS or the history of cloud or just modern technology. the the notion of marketplaces like this is Is a sleeper that people don't realize the true power of and quite frankly. It's not just aw.

I don't care whether you're talking about like the atlassian marketplace or you know, yeah IBM marketplaces and so forth. The fact is the marketplace is a great equalizer because it's almost like a meritocracy right? You have this solutions up there and it's self-serve.

Yeah and and users. They don't have to deal with Pushy salespeople, hopefully or you know, it's self-serving they decide what's the right solution and they may play with two or three before. They actually pick you know, what's the right one for them?

Okay. But it but it also allows someone who you just getting started in a platform. Where do I go?

What do I do? Yeah, right. And and what else can I do and man?

Let me go on the marketplace and check it out. And so what's the highest rated ones? What's the most downloaded ones, you know a little most popular and and you know instantly I become you know.

Savvy is that about it? So it's the market the power of the marketplace is I think vastly underreported and underrated. right Would I find interesting about these latest offerings is look I think everyone knows.

Hey, I want to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon check. Right. I want to run open shift on Amazon check.

Those are meat and potatoes, right? They're Table Steaks and a lot of people using that. but now with the theme of this show, which is cloud evolving Cloud maturing Cloud being more capable.

We're starting to see a data science offering right? Think about that. That's not just oh, let me spin up an instance and put a web server up there or an app server up there or database.

No it we know it data science, right which encompasses a whole bunch of different. Yeah pieces of that. It's pretty complicated.

Absolutely. And and you know, there's a there's a spectrum of maturity as well as a spectrum of needs, right and what we hear from our customers is yes, they want the built for the cloud fully managed Open source data science offering right in Marketplace, but they also want to see our application platforms and runtimes made available. So, you know, we we have a a product called EAP which is a j2e application server, right again, you know a technology that is still very very popular in the in the area in the Enterprise space customers who will be on those platforms for 10 20 years from now and need to move move to the cloud.

And so, you know, you'll see our catalog as part of our catalog you can get EAP server pay as you go, you know consumption based from Red Hat in the AWS marketplace right go knock yourself out. So so really for us we see customers gravitating towards using the marketplace. A data transact more efficiently right b, as you said, it's it's a great equalizer because you get the marketplace provider sort of setting the bar for quality for security for manageability.

Right? And so it's it's it's good to be able to Offer that that catalog to customers who have picked an ecosystem right and said now that you're in this ecosystem, right? Here's our here's our catalog of offerings within that catalog for for you to be able to deploy as you see fit.

I agree agree. So one of the questions I always have though is look. You do the self-serve thing.

You're using AWS. But now I want red hat. I want to engage with red hat, right?

Yes. It's a joint offering but I need red hat to help me here. How did how did customers bridge that?

Right, so I downloaded it from the marketplace. Yeah, I need a little no I want to engage maybe proserve or I want to I need help. Yeah, so, you know, so most of our customers on on the Enterprise side have existing relationships with us.

And so so for them, obviously, you know, they've they can rely on their account teams or whatever for for everyone else. We have dedicated customer success teams that are that are charged with making sure that our customers in the cloud have the best experience right right from Day Zero to you know through their life cycle. So we provide means for for customers to be able to to reach out be able to you know, chat with us online or or engage with us for support, you know.

We are kind of a unique software vendor in that, you know, all our offerings are open source, right? Everything comes from Upstream. So really the value a lot of the value we bring is in the lifecycle management the expertise and of course the the support and care and feeling of the customer experience.

So we've been that way with red hat too. So, you know, you don't lose any of that in the cloud actually. Have we hit all the offerings or all the announcements coming out of here?

Yes we have. All right. com go to our Newsroom and you'll see about the press release and links links to blogs all of these.

Yes. Thank you so much for coming up and spending some time with us. Thank you for having me.

Excellent. Go check out a whole slew of red hat announcements in new offerings coming out here around AWS reinvent. We're going to take a break.

We'll be back with our next guest in just a moment.