Fierce Focus: Aerospace & Defense Insights with Red Hat’s Jay Keller

Can you share a bit about your journey into the Aerospace & Defense sector and what led you to your current role at Red Hat?

I'm a Navy veteran and joined the Navy in 1995 in the meteorology and oceanography community.  I worked in the data center at a couple of the weather centers and on ship, and gravitated towards information technology as it was sort of a new field.

I would say the Navy, in general, gave me work ethic. They taught me to  do a job well,  do a job right. If I'm going to put my name on something, it needs to be something that I take pride in. After I got out of the Navy, I went to Boeing as an intern while I went to college on the GI Bill, doing some systems engineering work, and then had a unique opportunity to go into business development because I was able to fuse the technical part with the business part and derive value for customers.

I did that for about five years, and in late 2010 had an opportunity to come to Red Hat. I joined the Navy-Marine Corps team. It was the first West Coast account executive for that team working with the Navy and Marine Corps to at that time see open source products and services into the government, which was a new thing back in 2010.

In 2015, I transitioned into business development, going back to my aerospace and defense roots, and ran the team for a few large systems integrators. And in late 2016, I was asked to stand up what is now the aerospace and defense team  as a first account executive. And we've grown that business more than 25X since 2016.  Obviously, the team is much larger than just myself now, and we continue to serve the aerospace and defense customers to this day.

What makes A&D at Red Hat stand out within the organization?

We try to create an environment of winning. We put in the energy and effort into the team, and it just makes for a good place to work. Our customers were lucky to have. They are highly intelligent, highly skilled.  Not to say that all customers aren't, but ours are just a special breed of people that really get the technology and push the envelope with us. 

The fact that they're building satellites and aircraft, and ships, and submarines, and systems that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines use on a day-to-day basis,  allies use on a day-to-day basis. It's just a really exciting industry to be in. I think that's just what makes aerospace and defense like the best place to be within the organization.  It's certainly the best team that I've worked on  in my 15 years without question.

What do you look for in the channel for A&D growth?

What I'm looking for is the partnership of it, more so than the tactical piece of it. I think anyone can assign margin and push paper. That is not the challenge. The challenge is to demand creation and the cradle-to-grave sort of things that happen in the business. And that's what I  demand from the channel.

I look at the VARs as just an extension of our sales team as well. The better ones,  like Fierce Software, answer the phone, they're responsive, they follow up, they understand our business, you understand what we do. That makes our account executives' lives easier to execute and also makes our business grow faster.

What are the top technology priorities you’re seeing from your customers?

So there are two categories of capabilities that are in high demand in the aerospace and defense sector today.  Both of them have an internal usage implication and an external implication. The first of those is around automation.  As the aerospace and defense industry has a labor shortage issue, and combined with the fact that many of their employees can retire at will, they have to start to focus on automation as a capability so that they're not spending a lot of time and resources on repeatable tasks.  So that's the first area where we see a high demand in the aerospace and defense industry.  

The second part is around artificial intelligence.  And there are two parts that I would say are in high focus. So one is for the employee usage of artificial intelligence.  We are seeing chatbots and things internally for  HR systems and accounting, and questions that employees may have.  That kind of ties into the autonomy piece and the automation piece.  But the second part of that is developing go-to-market products for their end user customers around artificial intelligence and machine learning, and delivering those in a way that is ahead of market and is consumable by their end users in an easy way. So not an easy thing to pull off,  but both of those technology areas go hand in hand between automation and artificial intelligence.

How do you see A&D integrators adopting open-source technology?

If we go back to the beginning of my time at Red Hat, 2010-2011 era, the question was about open source technology versus proprietary. We were trying to sell the idea that open source was a more secure way to develop software, a more secure way to deliver software, that a million eyes on were better than 10 or 12 or 20 eyes on a proprietary software vendor. Those were the concepts that we were selling 15 years ago.

I think as you fast forward to 2025, the challenge now is actually community versus enterprise. So enterprise open source has a company responsible for the code, responsible for patching, responsible for CVE and vulnerability scanning, and other security interests that community software does not have. So the emphasis for the aerospace and defense industry today is around the adoption of enterprise open source software and ensuring that they understand the difference. 

How is AI shaping decision-making?

So within the aerospace and defense industry, AI is pervasive in nearly everything that they do, whether it be from HR systems to help employees,  accounting systems, things that are used to run the business, AI is there. On the research and development side, and how these integrators are determining the paths to go to market and the things that they're going to develop, AI is involved in that as well.  

We have public use cases available with our partnership with Lockheed Martin, where they have taken our Red Hat Device Edge offering, integrated their AI models on top of our platform on an autonomous unmanned system,  and flown that to do different vignettes and use cases for end-user customers.

Additionally, they've used our software to do work with the forestry service to do autonomous systems for forest firefighting on those aircraft as well. So there's a lot of use cases for AI, both in the corporate level and for the end users, for these aerospace and defense industry partners to deliver capabilities. And it affects all the decisions that they make.

How has the mission focus of Aerospace & Defense customers evolved in recent years?

I don't think the mission itself has changed as much as the way that the aerospace and defense industry is approaching the problems that they're facing today.  The advent of technologies like artificial intelligence,  autonomous systems,  autonomy in general, machine learning,  and even combining those capabilities together has allowed them to  deliver capabilities to their customers that weren't even possible five years ago.

So the mission hasn't changed to defend the nation, to defend our allies, but the way that they're addressing it has gotten more refined and more advanced than ever.