Red Hat President & CEO Jim Whitehurst Mike Ferris joins theCUBE hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and John Troyer (@jtroyer) live from Red Hat Summit 2018
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Applying old world smarts to new world tech, Red Hat thrives in cloud modernity
Having earned the faith of analysts and investors, Red Hat Inc.’s traction in cloud services makes it unique amongst open-source platform providers. A company that’s spanned the rise of groundbreaking open-source initiatives, from Linux to Kubernetes, Red Hat’s long been positioning itself for this moment of success. Now that the enterprise is adopting cloud computing technologies, the shifting market winds are delivering business right to Red Hat’s doorstep.
“We benefited from the fact that we’ve lived in the old traditional enterprise world for 20 years, helping them migrate from Unix to Linux,” said Jim Whitehurst (pictured), president and chief executive officer of Red Hat.
Noting the trends initiated by cloud-native companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, Whitehurst explained Red Hat’s ability to apply their developments to enterprise-specific problems. “I think we uniquely have a foot in both worlds. So we work and develop with the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, but we really think hard about how those technologies apply to a traditional enterprise and the context and legacy migration — and all the other issues that they face,” Whitehurst said.
Speaking with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and John Troyer (@jtroyer) during the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, California, Whitehurst sat down with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s roving news desk. The trio discussed Red Hat’s distinctive rise in the world of cloud computing, and how new partnerships with legacy tech giants IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are helping the company to scale even further into enterprise computing environments.
Spanning generations and technologies
In Red Hat’s efforts to span old and new worlds of tech, containerization comes up as a key enabler to the company’s current and future success. The innovative method for packaging and porting software applications across cloud platforms means enterprises no longer have to kill and replace software programs, as code can be managed in smaller pieces in conjunction with existing services.
The shift from monolithic services to containerized microservices has evolved computing architectures, helping to automate much of the administrative work and offloading the management tools to the cloud platform provider. As Red Hat’s flagship product OpenShift provides an open-source alternative for platform management, Red Hat continues to inject more value into the platform itself.
“Containers are Linux containers; we were there first. So, working to drive that paradigm I think we can be a significant share player in these new container platforms,” said Whitehurst, going on to highlight Red Hat’s support of multicloud and hybrid cloud structures.
Red Hat’s cross-generational appeal applies to people as well as software, as Whitehurst noted customers’ ability to leverage both “existing people and their skills.”
The traditional enterprise developer isn’t developing in a stateless, cloud-native way, having only four hours a month on average to do continuing education and new skill development, according to Whitehurst. “So much of the work you’re doing is around existing estate. … You can take you’re existing people on a journey versus this big chasm you have to get over,” he said.
For all of Red Hat’s current success, it needs a strong ecosystem to scale its products even further. Microsoft and IBM proved strategic partners, both announcing new integrated solutions with OpenShift at this year’s Summit. The team-up with IBM extends its Cloud Private for Data platform to OpenShift.
The level of integration between Red Hat and Microsoft is an industry first, offering a fully managed version of OpenShift on Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform. Customers can now set up an OpenShift deployment on Azure containing the same application building blocks as their on-premises environments.
“When we look at next-generation platforms, we strongly believe we add value by abstracting [management] away and giving choice at the infrastructure layer,” Whitehurst said.
Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
