In today’s information technology environment, the key word for enterprises of all sizes is simplicity. Red Hat Inc. is a worldwide provider of open-source enterprise IT solutions, and about 18 months ago the company acquired Ansible in an effort to streamline and simplify the Red Hat portfolio.

“The acquisition itself was a really great move. It was great for Ansible, great for Red Hat [because] it’s filled the gap that they needed on the automation side to make their products easier to install [and] configure,” said Tim Cramer (pictured), senior director of engineering director at Ansible by Red Hat.

Joining Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Cramer discussed the perks of collaboration with the open-source community and how Ansible and Red Hat are combining forces to bring simplicity to their products. (* Disclosure below.)

Combining simplicity and an open environment

Shortly after the two companies merged, Red Hat allowed Ansible to run the business as it had been doing in the past. The natural progression led to many of the internal teams using the newly acquired systems with Ansible acting as a consultant to answer questions and provide guidance.

“It took off virally, just like it seems to take off virally with a lot of our customers. [Now Ansible’s solutions are] literally in every product that Red hat ships today, and then we have deeper integration with some of the products,” Cramer stated.

The excitement for Cramer centers on Ansible being a software company and there is no competition with Red Hat’s hardware. Cramer described the culture at Red Hat as cooperative and open to working together along with other communities.

He noted that there is a great deal of collaboration with upstream communities or the original authors or maintainers of software. Being upstream-first oriented creates a better integration process and connects all the software together.

“It’s a really nice collaborative model so that there is a culture of collaboration and everybody’s trying to get the right things done. It’s fascinating,” Cramer said.

According to Cramer, the community has more than 2,600 contributors to Ansible and he enjoys the attention. It is difficult for him when the company cannot accept all the contributions, so his team is developing techniques and bots his team wrote to help people formulate their pull requests in an effort to receive more contributions.

“We’re also doing some tagging, making it really clear what things are managed by the core team itself; all the basic stuff and the engine of Ansible,” he explained.

Additionally, the vendor community is also contributing publicly, and Cramer is happy about the networking side. His core team is establishing standards to make sure the modules are reliable.

After resolving these open-source issues, Cramer is heading for the wild west of experimentation and innovation, he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE