Enterprise open source Toolkit

Red Hat chief: 'The clouds will all run Linux'

Tags:
Red Hat,
Mission Critical,
Next Generation,
Chief Executive

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 31 Jul 2008 14:37 BST

…the certifications and support and enterprise nature of those bits, [or feel] comfortable running those in a mission-critical environment.

I talk to them every now and again, and certification is more on their to-do list than on their done list.
It's the hard stuff. It's not really sexy stuff.

I draw a clear distinction between where we create value and where we extract value. You can't get too enamoured with one or the other. The airline industry creates a tonne of value, but it's never figured out how to extract any of it for itself. It's great for society, but never captured any money for itself.

With our model, we create value by working with the community to develop really good software. We extract value by making open source consumable by the enterprise.

Open source is iterative innovation — thousands of small projects going on out in the community. Iterative innovation is what makes open source so powerful, and it is a disaster if you're running a datacentre. Every two years, we set aside the major bits, test them, performance-tune them for the major applications, et cetera. Making it consumable is where we're able to extract value.

The airline industry is charging for checked bags now. Does this feel like sunny optimism compared to your last job?
Yes. When you had an operational mistake, you killed people. When you had a misstep, you could literally liquidate the company. This seems a little simpler. Obviously we have our challenges, but let's just say I'll take a good business model over a bad business model any day of the week. We figure out how we add value in a differentiated way and extract it in a defensible way.

One question on extension is on getting subscription revenue beyond the operating system: How's that working, for example with JBoss [Java server software]?
We have said that JBoss is growing twice as fast or more than our core software was in the first quarter, and we're targeting that for the entire year. It's looking good. We just announced our SOA suite. It far exceeded our expectations.

With our model, we create value by working with the community to develop really good software. We extract value by making open source consumable by the enterprise

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat

This is where we stick to our knitting. Open source, with our model, works best where certification, support [and] mission-critical [reliability] matter. That's where middleware matters, because it has similar sets of characteristics [to operating systems]. Virtualisation is another one. Those are the areas you'll see us focused on. It's where we can add value and make money.

So will you be sticking with the Red Hat Exchange [RHX] for your attempt to monetise higher-level software?
Yes. I want to be clear. On the exchange, I'm frankly not a big fan. We really have de-emphasised the actual exchange. The actual RHX programme is extremely important because I do think we add a lot of value [at lower levels], but, as customers want more solutions, we need to be working to ensure we have certified stack solutions — either appliances or certified stacks. So our RHX partnerships are extremely important there.

So that has evolved into a standard partner-certification play, and maybe some cross-selling agreements?
Yes. What we found is that a lot of people shopped on the exchange [and] then went directly to the vendor to buy, which makes sense. So we've turned it more into a catalogue. What we're working on hard is the appliances and certified stacks to make the stuff more consumable.

Red Hat has often been an advocate of open-source software, pushing the philosophical envelope, not just the business envelope. You're from the business mould, not the open-source advocacy mould. How do you see Red Hat's role now in leading the charge and waving the flag?
I joined because I believe in the mission. I've been a Fedora user for years at home. Economically, it is a fundamentally better way to develop software.

One thing I love about the company is that it's a great confluence: when we do well as a company, we do good for the communities of users and societies around us. The last thing that wasn't open source was Red Hat Network, and we just open-sourced it. We're all in. We are and should be leaders in open source, and that's the right decision for our shareholders as well.