The CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, has spoken of the “huge opportunity” to become the leader in enterprise cloud in a newsletter, describing the shift from client-server to cloud-mobile as a “once in every 20 years” change.
Whitehurst put pen to paper summing up Red Hat’s summer on a positive note with a glut of acquisitions and partner news over the past few months. The most recent of these was the buyout of Irish mobile backend as a service provider FeedHenry, as reported extensively on sister site Enterprise AppsTech last week.
The acquisition of FeedHenry made Red Hat’s third of the fiscal year, after open source storage system firm Inktank in April, and cloud services provider eNovance in June. Each acquisition, naturally, plays right into Red Hat’s strategic shift of an open hybrid cloud – and it’s also the case with strategic partnerships, including Cisco, Nokia and Google.
“When I talk to customers and partners, they are excited about the moves Red Hat is making, and they are thrilled by the leadership and enterprise open source know-how Red Hat is bringing to a promising and fast-growing project like OpenStack,” Whitehurst wrote, adding: “We want to show customers that open is better. We are bringing customers the tools they need to build their infrastructure from the ground up with open source, enabling amazing flexibility and choice.”
It’s safe to say Whitehurst’s claims to be the ‘undisputed leader in enterprise cloud’ might see raised eyebrows at IBM and SAP towers, just to name two examples. But the Red Hat chief’s vision about the state of the cloud market can be resonated by all its competitors.
“We’re staring at a huge opportunity,” he added, “the chance to become the leader in enterprise cloud, much like we are the leader in enterprise open source.
“The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises’ entire cloud infrastructure.”
Red Hat isn’t the only tech firm to ditch its hand recently. The legacy software vendors, such as IBM, SAP and Oracle – whose long-serving CEO Larry Ellison stepped down last week to move into a more technical role – are moving in the same direction.
But Red Hat is aiming to change from being the leaders of Linux to platform as a service kings. And given Amazon’s cloud services run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company will hope to become the power behind the throne.