Red Hat CEO: Our Future Lies with OpenStack

Red Hat CEO Jim Whithurst sees a future for the company as a leader in the enterprise cloud market, where Red Hat would still be a leader in enterprise open source. The company hopes to realize the growth with OpenStack, OpenShift and CloudForms.

Whithurst speaks in a blog post about a once every 20 year opportunity: “History shows that in the early days of such changes, winners emerge who set the standards for that period – think Wintel in the client-server arena” . Red Hat has a chance to be the enterprise cloud leader, according to the CEO, but he admits that the competition is fierce. “The prize is the opportunity to establish open source as the default choice for the next era,” said Whithurst.

According to the CEO, the future lies with OpenStack, OpenShift and CloudForms and Red Hat will focus on that, as well as on storage and middleware. However, he says Linux’s role is far from exhausted and he emphasizes that 90 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 list of successful companies use Red Hat Linux. Amazon’s EC2 cloud service also runs as an underlying platform, for example, on Red Hat Linux.

Red Hat is not alone in wanting to dominate the growing cloud market: the company faces fierce competition from Canonical, Cisco, VMware, HP, Google and Microsoft, among others.