In this special ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY episode of the POPCAST, we talk to the Babe Ruth of Tech Talk Stu Miniman. Stu is the Director of Market Insights for Red Hat but spent years as an analyst and host of theCUBE a show that covers enterprise tech thought leadership worldwide. Stu has interviewed thousands of guests on theCUBE and written on wide variety of enterprise technology topics. His past positions, including sales, product management and strategic planning provides him with perspective on how to focus on the needs of customers. Stuart's previous employers include EMC (with a primary focus on storage networking and virtualization), Lucent Technologies (now Avaya) and American Power Conversion. Stuart holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Bryant University. It was an honor to speak to Stu and its a perfect way to celebrate 1 Year of the POPCAST!
Timeline/Topic
00:00 - Sponsor - Lightstep
00:47 - POPCAST Opening
00:55 - Intro to Stu Miniman
02:01 - Stu's Journey
05:10 - Stu doesnt pull punches/whats real and what's BS
07:23 - What episode of The Cube did you find your rhythm
09:30 - Stu's foresight -- Docker and Kubernetes
13:22 - How did Stu hone his craft
20:14 - Top 3 Fav Interviews / Least Fav Interviews
27:00 - What does community mean to you Stu?
30:26 - What did Stu make the jump to Red Hat?
35:37 - Where does Stu see Openshift heading.
38:33 - What work is Stu Miniman most proud of?
Episode Links:
https://blogstu.wordpress.com/2020/10/05/lessons-from-10-years-of-thecube/
https://wikibon.com/author/stu/
https://techfieldday.com/video/stus-cloud-journey-to-red-hat/
Today’s episode sponsor(s) are:
Lightstep - Lightstep’s observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to understand changes in the health of their applications. By automatically analyzing application and infrastructure metrics and connecting dashboards to the underlying changes that matter, Lightstep helps you quickly mitigate outages and triage other issues. Download “The Ultimate Guide to Cardinality for Observability” at https://lightstep.com/popcast to learn more about how having the right data makes all the difference.
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POP (00:00):
This month's sponsor is Lightstep. Lightstep's observability platform is the easiest way for developers and SREs to understand changes in the health of their applications. By automatically analyzing application and infrastructure metrics and connecting dashboards to the underlying changes that matter, Lightstep helps you quickly mitigate outages and triage other issues. Download The Ultimate Guide to Cardinality for Observability at https://lightstep.com/popcast. To learn more about how having the right data makes all the difference, Lightstep.
POP (00:55):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Popcast. Hey, listen, you know this guy. He's the Babe Ruth. This is the guy. If I do what I do it's because of this guy. He's the director of Market Insights at Red Hat Cloud Platforms. He has a passion for innovation and communities. You know him as an alumni of theCUBE. Welcome to the Popcast, Stu Miniman.
Stu Miniman (01:19):
Hey, POP. Thanks so much for having me. Nice to talk to you one on one in person, and happy to share with your community.
POP (01:28):
So, look, when I started this show, I honestly made this show almost to be like the anti-CUBE. Not to say that nothing was wrong with it, and I was like, "Look," because theCUBE was like very much folks in college shirts, talking to folks and getting in there. But then I started studying you, because putting together this content, it's not easy, folks. I'm on almost 50 episodes and when this airs, I'll be in season two. It takes a lot, and I'm like, "This guy is my hero." I'm like, "Every single week, he's hard hitting. He knows the technology. He's doing the research."
POP (02:00):
So I want to talk to you about your journey. Again, we know about your Apple IIc from the start. We know about starting on your mother's TRS-80 and one of Apple II. I want to know like hey, I want to be a journalist. I want to be an analyst. Talk to me about POST-getting the computers saying, "I love this. Now, I want to kind of be this analyst." Talk to me about that.
Stu Miniman (02:21):
Well, first of all, analyst-journalist never were on my career path, POP. It's funny that you say that. A techie at heart, I studied engineering. Actually, I went into sales for a number of years because I had one of my early companies working in telecom back in the '90s. Voice, video and data was helping people running all their stuff.
Stu Miniman (02:43):
And my SE would be like, "Hey, Stu, why are you bringing me on this call? You know more about the tech than I do." It's like, "Well, POP, you know why you're a sales rep rather than the SE? It's actually the money." It's like the biggest thing. You can kind of move up as just a young hard-driving, going out there. I knew the product really well, and when.
Stu Miniman (03:05):
And so I did some sales. I took some corporate jobs. Had been a product manager, worked in engineering, worked for a large storage company. Maybe your audience might remember EMC for 10 years. And I was actually in this corporate CTO office my last three years there which was like my dream job working at that company.
Stu Miniman (03:24):
I said, I wanted to either work in M&A or work in the CTO office. So, got to look at all these forward-looking technology, played with a whole bunch of stuff. And obviously, this was about ... That was 2007 to 2010, I was in the CTO office. It was that transition of what was happening in virtualization and cloud.
Stu Miniman (03:42):
And it was really exciting stuff, and I was trying to advocate as much as I could internally to say we need to move faster. We need to embrace this more. And an opportunity came my way. And so, Dave Vellante, who was my boss for 10 years at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, Wikibon with the research, he came to me. And I actually at first something like, "Look, I've never wanted to be an analyst."
Stu Miniman (04:03):
Most analysts that I thought of back then, I didn't know if they really knew their stuff. We'd actually ... You pay analyst to rewrite whitepapers that I had done internally. So as an engineering background, I did not necessarily have the best ... I didn't think the best of analyst overall.
Stu Miniman (04:23):
I mean, yeah, they had their place, but when Dave hired me, it was, "Hey, we'd be able to talk about a lot of different technologies-
POP (04:31):
Let's talk about that, because I think it's one of your best traits. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to interrupt you. I think it's one of your best traits, because again, we come from that world ... When you're in sales, you have to come in and kind of talk about, you want to kind of walk a mile on the customer's shoes or the [inaudible 00:04:49].
POP (04:49):
The audience watching the show, they want to understand quickly what's ... They don't want the fluff. They don't want the marketing slides. They want to know, is this going to solve my problems? What does this thing do and will it solve my problems? That's the thing I admire so much about you. You get right to it, man. You don't pull punches. This is not going to be a marketing thing.
Stu Miniman (05:08):
As Yankee fans, we want to understand what's real and what's BS and kind of dig into some things. So look, when I hired ... Actually, I tell you, my first year or two there, an analyst's hat, I was tough. I'm like, "I'm not an analyst. I'm a blogger. I do all these things. I write these stuff. I talk about it." You want to debate something? Great, but what is an analyst?
Stu Miniman (05:32):
But I got to know a lot of analysts. I've got friends at some of the big firms, some of the small firms. There are smart people at every single analyst firm and plenty of them that I respect the heck out of. Now, the analyst business model, I'm not a huge fan of. We were small firm. We were boutique, and the analyst business in those early days actually was the driver to help us start and kick off theCUBE.
Stu Miniman (05:56):
We were an analyst business. There was journalist business, and theCUBE at the side thing to do videos and interviews, and it took a couple of years. I tell you, POP. I think I suck when I started. I was good at recruiting guests, knowing who to have on the program. I would do background research for John and Dave who did a lot of the interviews, but it took me years before I was really more comfortable, unless it was a technology that I knew well or a person that I'd read their stuff or knew their technology really well.
Stu Miniman (06:29):
So it took time. There's cycles. It's very different talking across the table with somebody rapid fire just like it's a little bit different doing all these remotes now. Every medium can be a little bit different and it definitely was one that, I wrote about it on my blog when I left after 10 years because people are like, "Oh, you're so natural and you're really good at this." I'm like, "Yeah, after you do a thousand interviews, the next one is not that tough. It's getting through that first thousand that can be a bit challenging."
POP (07:02):
And that's something we'll talk about a little later, advice our folks in this new media that want to do this because right now I think this is the medium, like doing this type of thing and talking about it. People are starting podcast every week, and trust me, in terms of what you did like a thousand shows to get your rhythm, I mean, it's almost 50 shows and I almost feel like I'm still getting my rhythm.
POP (07:21):
So talk to me about this again. This is where I want to know that one episode of theCUBE like, "Okay, we got this right." I want to know that.
Stu Miniman (07:29):
Oh, boy. That's a great question. And what I really loved doing, some of those big ecosystem shows. So for the 10 years I was there, one of the big one for us was VMworld. VMworld was a great place because we had our sponsors. First of all, one thing different from just a blog or, no offense, just any podcast is this was part of our business model and we were transparent as to we have sponsors and this is how we do it, and this is what we do.
Stu Miniman (08:00):
And when we create content, we do a lot of it. We go to a big show, we'll do three days of wall to wall coverage where you're doing like a dozen interviews a day. And actually sometimes we were doing two sets. I mean, a VMworld or an Amazon re:Invent, we could be doing 60, 70 interviews. Now, it all wasn't a host. We did two hosts. We spread out hosts. You send a whole team on it to be able to do it.
Stu Miniman (08:27):
But, I've loved like VMworld, Amazon re:Invent, or the KubeCon more recently where ones were I really loved architecting a program where you say, "Okay, I have some sponsors and I've worked with my sponsors to get good content like bring me your customers, as many customers as you can. Bring me some good thought leaders and people that can talk." And then I'd reach out into the community and pull in those guests.
Stu Miniman (08:51):
I'll look through your back catalog, and I'm like, "Hey, there's some good CUBE alumni in there, good people." And that's leveraging my network, my community, and doing research as to like, "Hey, who's going to be good story? How do we cover various topics and get a broad spectrum to try to hit a diversity of topics, a diversity of background? And hey, that diversity is also a good thing if we can manage it too."
POP (09:15):
I mean, let's talk about this again. You're so known for your foresight in the technology. And I remember you back in the OpenStack days. I worked at HPE Helion and that was the first time I went to a conference. I'm seeing these big lights. I'm seeing Stu. He's interviewing somebody, and I'm like, "Yeah, this guy, he's got it."
POP (09:30):
But your force, again, you as an engineer that you had this background about it, you called some shots. You went through like this and you called like Babe, right. You did that. So talk to me about like one you were like, "Let's talk about Kubernetes, for instance." When you were like, "Yeah, this is it. I get it. I get it now."
Stu Miniman (09:48):
Well, I tell you, it is challenging to say where do we make our bets. I mean, in early one, even before Kubernetes, I'll tell you, Docker. There was just a drum beat in the community. I was hearing it loud and clear. Solomon Hykes, I had on at Red Hat Summit in 2014. I tell you, I actually attended the first DockerCon not long after that, and the one time that I will tell you, "Hey, POP, I was in a press release and I was excited about it. I was quoted in the Docker 1.0 press release and it blew my mind because I was so excited because it was like ..."
Stu Miniman (10:26):
I'll show my age a little bit. I was dating my wife when we were in college, and I remember bringing her to the computer lab. I'm like, "You got to really see this." There's this world wide web thing with graphical pages." And she was like, "What's this? Some kind of toy and everything?" I'm like, "No, you don't understand. This is going to change everything."
Stu Miniman (10:44):
And Docker, we could feel that in the early days. Hey, I was at Amazon re:Invent when they announced Lambda. And I tell you, I didn't understand it at first. It was like I talked to the Redmond guys. I talked to some others out there and they were like, "No, you don't understand. This is going to change the way everything happens."
Stu Miniman (11:03):
So, Kubernetes, we were watching it. There were all the container orchestration battles going on at that time, and it seemed pretty clear relatively early that Kubernetes was the one to bet on. So, watching that and I really enjoyed the cloud native ecosystem. I know you're going to ask me about what brought me to Red Hat. I mean, that ecosystem, the community that's forming around it, it's just amazing to watch.
Stu Miniman (11:34):
Having watch the virtualization ecosystem, what's happening in the public clouds. That cloud native space, if you will, is something that still in relatively early days and just so much excitement around it.
POP (11:47):
It's interesting you bring up Solomon, and again interviewed him. I don't think he gets the respect he deserves. And what I mean by that is like, look, in terms of the technologies out there, to be able to kind of give almost that Google experience to the lay user, I think in terms of container technologies, there wouldn't be without Docker. So I give props to them on that and especially to Solomon.
Stu Miniman (12:11):
Yeah. Well, here's the thing about communities. There's people underneath the communities and we would have these debates in open source and say, "Do you need the fanatical dictator to drive something?" In the early days, if you were Docker, Solomon was like over your shoulder watching [inaudible 00:12:29].
Stu Miniman (12:29):
I had some friends that worked at Docker. I knew some companies that got bought by Docker and washed. And the other people there, is Docker trying to have too much control? Is it going to be more open? There are some people that have some friction with Solomon personally.
Stu Miniman (12:47):
But POP, I agree with you. I think we owe Docker a debt of gratitude to what they helped spark. If it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't be talking about Kubernetes. We wouldn't be talking about OpenShift and all the pieces here.
POP (13:02):
Everyone of the godfathers I've had on. I've had Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie and Brendan Burns. And then obviously, I had Clayton Coleman recently. And again, all of them already talked about that, weaving that little thread throughout this Docker. And so to me, he's in that Mount Rushmore of what we do, without a doubt.
POP (13:21):
So let me talk to you about this, and again, it was going back to you as you, Stu. What would you say, there's three traits again that I think is your very ... If you want to find out about a subject you're fanatical about, getting that subject, that's one thing. The foresight on technology but also again, it's that ability to kind of bring in people that's starting this program.
POP (13:42):
Talk to me about just building that. Again, you did this over a series of shows. But talk to me about building those capabilities like what did you do to hone them in?
Stu Miniman (13:52):
Yeah. So first thing, what you really need to understand is what is the goal? What are you doing? And I wrote about it when I left theCUBE, but Dave Vellante instilled in me that who we're talking to eventually is we want to help customers. That's in the back of my head as to who I'm talking about.
Stu Miniman (14:14):
So everybody can have their marketing discussion and we can talk about various features with this and that, but at the end of the day, how are we helping businesses? How are we helping them move forward? What is the role of IT going forward and are we spinning our wheels or are we actually making progress?
Stu Miniman (14:34):
Starting from there, and being able to put yourself in the shoes. Anytime you give a presentation, the first question you should have is who's my audience? Who am I trying to reach there? If I can't speak enough of their language, they're not going to understand. What we have sometimes, there are these gaps that we need to worry about.
Stu Miniman (14:54):
So, number one, if we're talking about really cool new technology, the question is, is that approachable to most people? I used to say, "Hey, when you work for any company and you come up with brand new product," and you want to say, "Hey, this is wonderful and this is great." Well, if your average customer is running something that's two years or four years old, they might not be able to get from where they are to where you want to be.
Stu Miniman (15:21):
So, how do you close that gap? How do you make it approachable? How do you help bring them along? One of the things I love and I've been an advocate, if you talk about cloud in general, is, "Hey, am I actually keeping up on versions?" We've all worked on the, "Oh, hey, I install something, and let me leave it there because it's not breaking anything."
Stu Miniman (15:44):
But we know that you were more secure if you're constantly updating your code and the whole CI/CD movement is to be able to break things up and move faster. I'm a big advocate of not necessarily chase the new shiny, but hey, we need to try to keep up with things because if you don't keep up with enough pieces, your competition will all be Netflix, Amazon, however you name it. You need to be able to keep up and take care of it because if you're doing something and it's become 5 or 10 years old, you're likely just going to be disrupted.
Stu Miniman (16:21):
That putting yourselves in those shoes is one. The other thing, I talked kind of my spider sense out there. How am I connected with the community? Because, POP, here's the thing. I've been around long enough and know enough to know that I know nothing. But that being said, there are shows that I would go into and a week before the show, it's like, "I'd never heard of the company. I don't know the technology."
Stu Miniman (16:47):
So, you go do that basic research. Luckily, usually, there's podcasts. There's blogs and videos and lots of ways to learn that. If you learn 10 things about a certain technology, you probably know more than 90% of the world out there. And then once you know those base pieces, you can build on it and learn.
Stu Miniman (17:07):
And our process also of doing theCUBE is if you do one interview and you need to study up for every interview, well, here's a little thing that we get to do. Normally, it's more like you're going to do 10 interviews. So maybe on the first interview, you're a little bit shaky and not knowing anything and you can start a little bit broad with one-on-one. By the time you get to that fourth or fifth interview on the same topic, it's like, "I'm a pro. I've already heard the CEO talking about something. I talked to a customer. I got to ask some questions." So, you do need to ramp up fast.
Stu Miniman (17:41):
I do have ... You talked about that you want to have that learn everything, not that know anything, know everything mentality. I think I hit three things there to your questions.
POP (17:54):
You nailed it. You nailed it. I mean, one of the things I do and just like, again, we all have the luxury right now because we're home. If I have a guest on, I'd get their technology and install it in my rack here and I'm using it. I wouldn't that luxury like you said, if I'm having to do 10 interviews a day, you know what I'm saying? So that's amazing.
POP (18:13):
You're basically weaving this tale based on all different sources. That takes talent, man. I'm not blowing something up here-
Stu Miniman (18:21):
No. So look, here's one of those tips is there are certain things that I'm not going to be an expert on everyone, but there are certain ... I'll have a premise. Hey, it's 2020 coming into the year, what are some of the key themes that I want to poke and prod at. I did a series before I left. I called it Cloud Native Insights and it was like, hey, when I talked to most people and you say cloud native, the first thing they think of is, "Oh, we're going to containerize our environment and play with Kubernetes."
Stu Miniman (18:51):
And I'm like, "Wrong answer." To be cloud native, I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and agility that's out there. And by cloud native, it means probably mostly in the cloud because here's one of the ... Look, on premises, your data center, it's great if you can get rid of all of them. It's going to take time.
Stu Miniman (19:12):
Modernizing your applications, a long pull in the tent. It's going to take time. But where is innovation happening? Where can I plug into new services. There are some things that can go across all the clouds, security, data protection. Maybe people have heard of OpenShift. These are things that you can go in your data center, in the public clouds and lots of different environments.
Stu Miniman (19:35):
But where are some of the cool new features happening? A lot of those are really happening either by the public cloud providers or from their massive growing ecosystem. That's something I poked on and hey, a lot of the things I was poking at the last couple of years, Serverless. Serverless is still pretty cool. We will see if it is a wave that takes over. We've been watching the connection between the containerization and what's happening with cloud native to connect to Serverless.
Stu Miniman (20:06):
These technology trends tend to broaden a little bit and it's not like everything all goes to the new thing.
POP (20:13):
So I'm going to ask you again a question about ... Basically, I'm going to ask you what your top three interviews were that you were like, "Wow, you know what ..." Look, I want to get into it, man. I want to know like these were things that were like, "Wow." These people, again, would talk about the technologies, you were blown away by Docker, blown away by Kubernetes, blow away by OpenShift.
POP (20:34):
But then you were talking to these people, and like they get it. These are three people in your brain that were like, they get it.
Stu Miniman (20:43):
I'm sorry. Out of a couple of thousand interviews, you're asking me to pick three? I do a top 10 list every year and that is-
POP (20:51):
I want you to do three. You're on my show. I want three.
Stu Miniman (20:55):
Oh, boy.
POP (20:56):
And then I want your three worst.
Stu Miniman (20:57):
Oh, boy. The worst ones are easy. That's when mid-level product manager wants to tell you about the dot revision feature list that he's got. You want to tell a story. Look, there are so many interviews I've done that I was agog. My background is networking. The Mount Rushmore of networking, like I've met and talked to some of those people. James Hamilton, who is the Einstein architect of AWS. I mean, I've talked to him a bunch of times. I hung out at a cocktail hour with him and his wife.
Stu Miniman (21:37):
POP, it's not just that I've met these people, but I get to know some of them, which was amazing to me. So, top three. Look, Andy Jassy probably has to be there. There are a few people that are just legend in this industry that are absolutely unreal. Andy Jassy, leaders like Michael Dell is the one that when people that aren't in our industry would ask me what I do, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I work on technology. I do this and that." I was like, "Somebody ... You probably heard of Michael Dell," and they're like, "Yeah. Of course I've heard of him. I'm looking at his laptop right now."
Stu Miniman (22:16):
And Michael is fascinating. If they wrote a book on Michael, I'd totally read that because he is just so focused. And people in the cloud space would be like, "Ugh, you know they're like laptops and infrastructure and they're not that interesting." I'm like, "Michael is fascinating if you are a student of technology and what has happened. He has been through so many waves in what he's done."
Stu Miniman (22:43):
And networking, I said Andy Bechtolsheim, who is one of the founders of Sun. He is one of the founders of Arista. He did so many startups. I mean I tell you personally, I was so excited. We didn't interview with him and he usually doesn't like doing media. John Furrier and I did it, and he's walking away and we can hear him say to his people. He's like, "That was a lot of fun. We should do that again sometime."
Stu Miniman (23:04):
And we're like high-fiving. It's like not just our audience enjoys it, I mean the thing that would give me such joy is when people would stop me and be like, "Hey, you ask great questions. I love the guests you get."
Stu Miniman (23:17):
So, three, Andy Jassy is one. I tell you, there are so many CIOs that I've spoken to that I've just loved, and I can't even choose one. There's a couple of CIOs of towns. There was one in Texas and one in Ohio. If you talk about innovation and using sensors and doing it on a relatively tight budget, you wouldn't think of a town government as this source of innovation growth but those kind of things so excite me.
Stu Miniman (23:53):
I had a friend of mine, Joep Piscaer, was the CTO at a service provider. And I met him. It was at a Nutanix show. And I'd interviewed him and talked. And a month later, I put up my list of top 10 and he sent me a note. He's like, "Stu, I think you made a mistake." I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "How many interviews did you do this year?" I'm like, "A few hundred. Why?" He's like, "There's no way I'm in the top 10." I'm like, "No, your story was awesome. Service providers? How fast they move on technology?" He ended up being a host for theCUBE, and he's a friend of mine. He lives in the Netherlands.
Stu Miniman (24:26):
Meeting those people around the globe ... So, I'm going to talk in and going off on tangent, so I don't think ... The generic CIO that has a good story, Andy Jassy and community people. I tell you, I used to joke if you come on theCUBE five times, I'm going to turn you into a host. Brian Gracely, who's now peer of mine at Red Hat, been a friend of mine for more than a decade was on theCUBE a bunch. I spent years recruiting him. He came and worked for us for a year. He was sitting next to me and doing interviews. Loved him. Your audience probably knows The Cloudcast which is-
POP (25:02):
I've been on it with Brian, I'm a big fan of his. He's one of the ones people ask me, "Well, POP, what do you listen to?" I was like, "Well, it's definitely the Cloudcast. It's definitely the one and the CNCN as well. Those are the ones I watch.
Stu Miniman (25:15):
And one more namedrop I'll give you here. It's like in the cloud community now, everybody knows Corey Quinn. I cannot believe, I connected with Corey a few years ago. And it was at an Amazon, one of their regional summit in San Francisco. I sent him a DM on Twitter. I'm like, "Hey, Corey, you want to come, do a little analysis segment with me?" He's like, "Yeah, that'd be great." We finished it and he's like, "This is the first video I've ever done." And I'm like, "No, you're kidding. You were great."
Stu Miniman (25:44):
So, I had him on again. He came and co-hosted KubeCon in Barcelona with me and did an Amazon summit in New York City. He'd done a bunch of that. But, I mean, Corey now is like the top cloud influencer out there. He's got his own podcast. He's always on webcast and things like that. Corey is a great guy and just part of the community and that's why, as I said, community people, another good friend of mine, John Troyer. People in the virtualization community know him. He started the vExpert program.
Stu Miniman (26:16):
People like that, I loved building out my guest host bench because all I look for is people that are even more connected and smarter and better at this than I am because eventually, it's like, "Hey, I love to be able to pyramid out and grow that and build that brand."
POP (26:34):
Fan of Corey. Stop avoiding me, Corey. Anyway, he's a good dude. Like I said, I just think I find ... He's a very witty guy and he doesn't hide that. I love it about that guy.
Stu Miniman (26:46):
Oh, my god. And he knows his stuff so well. And you and he could ... Just tell him he's allowed to curse as much as he want on your program. That will bring him in. He might not like the Yankee hat.
POP (26:56):
Tough. All right, let me ask you this question. What does community mean to you?
Stu Miniman (27:04):
Community, I love community. I tell you, one of the things I pride myself on is I want to be, as much as I can, part of this community. I used to have disclaimer as an analyst. Look, I don't touch hands on gear, but I have enough background. I did programming back before it was coding, learned Fortran and Pascal when I was in high school. I understood enough INF Technology. I could really hang out with the geeks and help translate what they're doing.
Stu Miniman (27:35):
But you don't just ... Most journalists, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, they would watch a community from the outside. I really try to, as much as possible, I want to be in the community. There's actually a friend of theCUBE, a friend of Dave Vellante's, a guy that also does ... A program he does is called the GroundTruth. It's, how do you bring into countries to enable the local populist to create journalism there?
Stu Miniman (28:10):
And I mean, we're talking in Egypt, in Africa and it was just a phenomenal program to help enable because reporting in those communities and understanding the cultures of those communities, it's best if you can do it from there.
Stu Miniman (28:26):
In many ways, look, as I said, I never consider myself a journalist. I was a media person and an analyst and I did embrace that analyst role eventually. But as much as I could, I tried to get to know the locals in all of the communities and those watering holes. I didn't just show up ... Some shows, I'd go to the Oracle show. You go to the Intel show and some of the big TV media brand, they show up. They set up their thing. They do three, five-minute interviews and then they all leave.
Stu Miniman (28:59):
No, we spend the week in there. I'd go to the keynotes. I'd go to Q&A sessions. You do the breakouts. It's not like I'm doing the hands-on lab but as much as you can, you talk to the people there. Nothing better than stopping at breakfast or lunch and sitting down with somebody. It's like, "Hey, who are you and what do you do and how are you finding the show?"
Stu Miniman (29:19):
You get this great intel. And it's one of those things that, this year was just so tough. Keeping the connection to the community when you can't be with them physically has definitely been a challenge.
POP (29:35):
That's why I do the show. Basically again, it's like trying to connect to people, behind the code to the people at a human level. And again, like you said, you don't find out anything but if you sit down with somebody and talk to them. And like you said in your interviews, it's like, "Well, I got to know this person. I got to know this person."
POP (29:53):
And that's what I love about the community. That's one thing ... The forefathers that started this, you can think of like Novotny, and you think of all those folks that kind of ... I love the fact it's so inclusive and everybody wants to learn from somebody else. Right now, you're giving me your time and it's so precious to me because I'm learning so much just by ... You didn't have to do this and that's what I love about this community. It's so open and we need to perpetuate that. We need more students. We need more POPs doing those things. So, it's amazing.
POP (30:25):
I want to talk to you a little bit about why ... Look, we dealt with theCUBE, we did all these interviews and then we're like, "Okay, I'm going to go to Red Hat," and I know, it made complete sense to me because I'm unabashed Red Hat fan boy. You know that. And also OpenShift ... OpenShift to me is the best curated version of Kubernetes out there.
POP (30:47):
Earlier, you're talking about, "Hey, those people that want to have these upgrades in place." I mean that acquisition of CoreOS, dynamite, amazing. I want to have Polvi and Brandon on. That's another thing we'll talk about. But basically again, I want to know why. I want to know, "Hey, I had this amazing career and still I'm going to perpetuate this," but why did we go to Red Hat and work in an OpenShift cloud platform?
Stu Miniman (31:08):
It was funny. I was catching your interview that you did with Clayton and he was talking about when he first met Brandon. And I think I probably met Brandon within an hour of when he did because I was at that first DockerCon and the CoreOS team was there. I think I actually have a CoreOS sticker right over my shoulder there.
Stu Miniman (31:29):
And it was funny because CoreOS was going to kill Red Hat, take them down. We need less operating system and it's going to be the core model of updating and all this stuff. But first of all, I've actually worked with Red Hat for two decades. My first interactions were, I said back in my early days at EMC, I was the product manager for Linux and it was the wild west days.
Stu Miniman (31:50):
So, big supporter of open source, loved the idea. We've gotten past calling it free software and it kind of had that open source development model. But Linux, going from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6 kernel, there's patches everywhere and our ability to be able to support at EMC, Linux attached was a nightmare trying to ... We were working with VA and Turbo, SUSE, and Red Hat came out. And when Red Hat first created Red Hat Advanced Server and then Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they gave a solution that actually we could say, "Hey, Red Hat supports it. We're okay with you doing it," thumbs up and went there.
Stu Miniman (32:30):
And so that was my early days really appreciated what Red Hat had done to bring Linux to the Enterprise. And back doing theCUBE about seven years ago when OpenShift started, we engaged and started working with them. We went to Red Hat Summit for a bunch of years but it's the cloud group. That's what really drew me living in the KubeCon environment. We know, you said you weren't going to mention Kubernetes that much because Kubernetes that much because Kubernetes is at the center and it's super important. But everything else around-
POP (33:10):
Stu, I'm not going to mention it at all. I'm not going to mention it at all.
Stu Miniman (33:15):
So, we know that ... What do companies need? They need more simplicity. They need somebody to help them pull these pieces together. And really today, Red Hat is just head and shoulders above beyond the rest of the market.
Stu Miniman (33:30):
I've had the opportunity to interview not just Red Hat people but I knew the ecosystem, and I talked to a lot of customers. I talked to OpenShift customers. I talked to customers from some of the other companies out there and there's just so many more Red Hat ones and their stories of how they can move their business forward and work through their transformations and modernizations that was just really attractive.
Stu Miniman (33:52):
And I tell you, the culture is another thing. I happened to live in Massachusetts. Red Hat has got a big presence here. They've built a couple of years ago just a beautiful briefing center in the Seaport District, which is hot and everything like that. So the culture, where they sit in this ecosystem, and I'll tell you. A couple of years ago, it was like, "Ugh, but IBM bought them. Oh, well."
Stu Miniman (34:19):
And it actually hasn't been an "Oh, well", at least not yet. I tell you, there's a fierce protection of the Red Hat brand and the Red Hat culture, and I love that. Arvind became CEO of IBM. He's a super smart guy, knows his technology. He brought Jim Whitehurst over to be his number two as president. Jim is awesome too. I had the opportunity to talk to him a bunch of times, read his book, got to interview him about his book.
Stu Miniman (34:47):
Overall, their place in the market, their culture and what's happening, it was just something that's like, "Hey, here's the solution set in a group that really going gang busters." And I felt that I could join to have an impact and help them along what they're doing. And I actually even get to get a little bit deeper into this ecosystem that I've been having a lot of fun with for the last handful of years.
POP (35:11):
I mean, it's like they're an ensemble in the Avengers. They got you. They got a Sesh. I mean, Paul Cormier is awesome. I've had Szumski. Szumski is from CoreOS. He's built some of the operating framework. That dude should be the CEO of that company someday. That dude is brilliant, down-to-earth with technology. He knows the community like that, again, kudos on this. It's an amazing turn for you.
POP (35:38):
And I want to ask you this kind of a followup to this. Where do you see Red Hat going forward now?
Stu Miniman (35:44):
Well, you've talked to a bunch of those leaders in the company as you said. When I looked at it from the outside and I said, "Hey, why is IBM spending $34 billion on Red Hat?" It was easy. It's OpenShift. That is the core of what they're doing.
Stu Miniman (36:03):
Here's where I think you're going to look down the line. This year, I remember a couple of people saying, "You know, Microsoft first bought GitHub. We thought they really overpaid for it." We were wrong. We think it was a steal and we think that was a great acquisition. And Microsoft had already gone through a transformation some with Satya Nadella but GitHub, really super charging.
Stu Miniman (36:23):
I think we have the opportunity not only for people going forward to say, "Hey, wow, cloud platform, OpenShift, all the things around this, has that transformed for me to think of Red Hat as much more than a Linux company." Red Hat's vision is to be just the fundamental technology for the industry.
Stu Miniman (36:44):
And that can also be the catalyst to help IBM, the battleship that it is. By the way, I happen to have an MBA and when you study history and everything, it's always like, "Well, whenever a new technology comes out, it destroys everything before it." Except for IBM, they really don't follow all the rules. They've been around for what, 110 years and they've weathered all of these storms.
Stu Miniman (37:11):
I look at IBM, they manage to ride through a lot of changes and still drive a lot of innovation. Red Hat as a company is built for the change environment. I heard that Sesh gave a presentation two years ago that really resonated with me, talked about just how many changes there are in Linux, how many changes there are in Middleware, how many changes there are in Kubernetes on a monthly basis.
Stu Miniman (37:34):
And that's what everybody needs to deal with is the constant state of change. And the question used to be, how do you keep up with change? And the answer is, I need to be able to turn to my trusted partners, my trusted suppliers. So, that's the opportunity for Red Hat, to be really such a trusted important partner for enterprises in this current century.
POP (38:01):
It is the indemnified version of Kubernetes, that is, they can default control plane that runs on any cloud. I don't care. And for any business ... You talked about what's good for the business, right? At the end of the day, Red Hat has done it operating system-wise. They even did with OpenStack back in the IaaS days. Now, they're doing with this cloud control plane. I think this move by you is one of your best among many, many great decisions you've made in your career, Stu, and I wish you all the best of luck in this.
Stu Miniman (38:31):
Well, thank you so much, POP.
POP (38:33):
What work are you most proud of?
Stu Miniman (38:36):
POP, do you want ... Are you looking for my entire career or are you looking for something more recent? What exactly ...
POP (38:49):
The floor is yours, Stu. The floor is yours.
Stu Miniman (38:51):
Oh, boy. It's so tough. I spent 10 years as an analyst and the usual answer to everything was always it depends. Look, I think I'm too fresh in my role at Red Hat, obviously, to have something there. If I talk about what I've done at theCUBE, really it was building. It was a body of work and helping that community. So, the feedback I've gotten from people including what you have said is people turned us for a source to say, "Hey, how do I learn about a technology? How do I learn about a person? How do I learn about certain partnerships?"
Stu Miniman (39:34):
Some of these things, in many ways, one of our earliest clients called us the ESPN of tech. But underneath the covers, there's one of those things that some people would look at this and be like, "How do you even talk about that stuff? Isn't that pretty boring?" And the answer is there are no boring topics. There are sometimes boring people, but how do I find the passion of the people because when you ask me about good and bad interviews, it's the person that's excited about what they're doing.
Stu Miniman (40:06):
You know in the open source world. I mean there are people that get a little bit too far into it is the code is my life. It's like practically a religion on some of these things. But at the end of the day, usually, you find people that are excited. They're moving technology forward and they're sharing. That's something overall that I was super proud of. I guess if I get a little specific, it was really ... I loved kind of collecting these personalities and pieces.
Stu Miniman (40:38):
So, certain people I got to know more. I talked to James Hamilton. Somebody like Martin Casado who is the founder of software-defined networking in Nicira. It's like, "Hey, Martin," I met him before he was acquired by VMware. I got to interview him a bunch of times when he's there. Some of these people I built relationships with and then, hey, some of the ones I was just agog on.
Stu Miniman (41:01):
I interviewed one of my favorite authors, Walter Isaacson, which is like ... I had to practically tackle him at a conference and pull him to do an interview. And it was only seven minutes and I only had three questions. I wish I had done at least one of them over but I was so excited because here's a guy that I've read almost every book that he's written, just lots of biographies about amazing people there.
Stu Miniman (41:27):
So, those are ... Hey, we had on Nate Silver. We had on ... Malcolm Gladwell was one that I helped get. I was so disappointed I wasn't at the event where we got to interview him. Or one of my all-time favorites that I was watching live remotely but wasn't there was John Cleese. And I helped because my boss sent me a text. He's like, "Oh, my God. What do I ask John Cleese?" And I literally in all caps texted back, "Are you fucking kidding me? John Cleese of Monty Python?" And he's like, "Yeah. No, what do I ask him because ..."
POP (42:00):
Was it The Parrot Sketch?
Stu Miniman (42:01):
Well, it's funny, I put it out to like Twitter and Facebook and everything what do I ask. You need to go watch that interview. I've sent that interview to more people than anyone. I will just ... It ends almost like a Monty Python skit but they did ask him. The Twitter community of course said, what is the average airspeed of an unladen swallow? And without even blinking, John Cleese just comes back and he said, "I believe I knew the answer to that in 1976."
Stu Miniman (42:29):
And it was just like slam, love it. I love that British humor and sarcasms, why we like Corey Quinn, has some of those backgrounds too. Some of those things and personalities and just great stories that we can tell from that we did.
Stu Miniman (42:50):
Look, it was a phenomenal roller-coaster of a ride for 10 years, over beer sometimes. I definitely have lots of stories I can tell and love sharing them. And looking forward to making some new stories with the new crew here.
POP (43:04):
Awesome. And again, I thank you for being on the show for sharing. I thank you for also being a hero of mine and just being so open with your time. It's really awesome to see that. And I appreciate you, Stu, for being on the show.
Stu Miniman (43:16):
Hey, POP, just the advice I will give you. I'll give you, your audience, the same advice that I give Corey Quinn when he was thinking about starting a podcast. I said, rule number one, be yourself. As much as you can, that's what we need. We don't need more cloud podcast. We don't need this. What we need is we need more people sharing their individual voice, their viewpoints and digging in because that's where ...
Stu Miniman (43:42):
As you said, the technology is great and everything but at the end of the day, it's the people. It's the community. It's those interaction. That's what makes it interesting, at least for me, and I know you share some of that viewpoint too.
POP (43:55):
Thank you so much for being on the podcast and everybody out there, make sure you like and subscribe. All right, thank you.