In today’s data-intensive business climate, automation is critical to managing and changing IT infrastructure and organizational operations.

Jointly supported by Red Hat Inc. and Microsoft, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure enables IT organizations to automate and scale in the cloud quickly. It offers the flexibility to deliver any application anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity, according to Thomas Anderson (pictured, right), vice president and general manager of the Ansible Business Unit at Red Hat.

“Whether it’s the edge, cloud or cloud to edge, all of those things, we want to provide users with out-of-the-box Ansible content that allows them to just get up and automate super fast. And doing that on Azure makes it way easier,” Anderson stated. “Ansible is the common automation platform that allows customers to reuse automation across all platforms. The number of things that you can automate with Ansible is in the thousands and thousands.”

Anderson and Tracie Zenti (pictured, left), director of global partnerships for Red Hat and Nutanix at Microsoft, spoke with industry analysts Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin at Red Hat Summit during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the Ansible Automation Platform boosts innovation by hastening workloads, as well as gave insights on the Microsoft-Red Hat partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Azure as a honeypot for partners

With partners being super important to business success, Anderson believes Azure provides an ideal platform for collaborations.

“Some of our launch partners are like F5 and CyberArk, who have certified Ansible content for Ansible on Azure,” he explained. “We have service provider partners like Accenture and Kindra that are launching with us and providing our joint customers with the help to get up to speed. So it really is a partner play.”

By adding value together, Zenti believes the Microsoft-Red Hat partnership presents a good customer experience.

“The partnership with Red Hat has been strong for a number of years,” she pointed out. “I think seven or eight years we’ve been working together and co-engineering — Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is co-engineered; Ansible is also co-engineered.”

Managing Ansible should not be a headache for enterprises because the partnership caters to all the heavy lifting, according to Anderson.

“It’s a kind of a win-win situation for us and our customers,” he said. “We manage the infrastructure for them, and the customers get to just focus on automating their business. They just worry about using Ansible to automate their infrastructure.”

The automation rendered by Ansible provides enterprises with ease of use, enabling them to be more innovative. “So it runs in the customer account, but it acts kind of like SaaS … so Red Hat gets to manage it,” Zenti added.

With Ansible supporting cross-cloud automation or automation to their hybrid cloud, Anderson sees it as a steward of upstream communities.

“It’s in Red Hat’s DNA … to be the catalyst in a community, to bring partners and users together, to share their knowledge and their expertise and their skills, and to make the code open,” he added.

Marketplaces are the future because they enhance IT consumerization, according to Zenti.

“So what we can do with the consumerization of IT is make it easier to innovate,” she pointed out. “So as we progress and customers can run from anywhere in the world and buy from anywhere in the world and make it simple to do those things that used to take maybe two months to spin up, I think that’s what marketplaces are really going to bring to the forefront is that innovation.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE