Red Hat aims for public cloud domination

Jim Whitehurst: Only Red Hat and Microsoft have all the technology to deliver public clouds

Red Hat is possibly the most successful open source company in the world, and the firm believes that the open source development process makes it best placed to drive enterprise adoption of public cloud computing, ahead of rivals such as Microsoft or VMware.

At a roundtable event in London, Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst outlined the company's approach to cloud computing, and the way IT services are heading in the near future.

Whitehurst identified three basic trends in today's IT: cloud computing; flat budgets; and online services such as those from Google driving expectations for enterprise IT projects.

"For every chief information officer of any major company in the world today Google is your competitor, at least in terms of the expectations your users have of what you can deliver," he said, explaining that tools such as Google Mail provide a better collaboration experience than many enterprise-grade products.

"Expectations have gone through the roof in terms of what people expect IT to be able to deliver, not only the richness of the content and the speed at which they can be delivered, but the cost because Google is free."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Whitehurst sees open source development as the answer to this problem because of its ability to respond rapidly and because open source projects tend to add features via small iterative changes instead of lengthy development cycles.

"We're seeing an explosion in demand for our application infrastructure software, JBoss, JBoss developer studio and all the other components that allow an enterprise to build an application very rapidly and get them running in a production environment," he said. Budgets are also driving organisations to open source, he added.

As for cloud computing, Whitehurst admitted that he initially dismissed it as a fad, but now believes that the economic arguments are compelling for re-centralising IT back to the datacentre.

"Going from two per cent utilisation of a server to 90 per cent has massive benefits, as does keeping data centralised in this world of security and privacy concerns, keeping functionality close-in, and doing away with the sprawl of PCs that costs more in support costs than the hardware does," he explained.

Red Hat's role in developing the cloud is to work with customers to make sure that they have choices at every level of the stack, the firm said, otherwise organisations risk getting locked to a single architecture once more.

"If you can't move your data out from the stack, cloud computing will become the mother of all lock-ins and one of the most expensive things the enterprise ever does," Whitehurst warned.

Red Hat is already providing the virtualisation infrastructure behind many of the available public clouds, such as those of IBM and NTT, and said that it can provide the tools for service providers to build certified stacks that will allow customers to move applications around.

"Workloads will not migrate from the enterprise to public clouds until those customers can be sure they can run them into production, get the performance they expect and the support they expect," Whitehurst said.

He contrasted Red Hat's cloud strategy against VMware's, which he described as monolithic in nature. Instead, Red Hat is working to build an ecosystem that is vendor-neutral so that customers have a choice and can move their applications if they wish.

Whitehurst also predicted that the global market for public cloud infrastructure may end up being served by just a handful of providers.

"If you look in terms of the software stack to make a cloud work, there are three companies that have the majority of components to do that: Red Hat, VMware and Microsoft. In terms of having all the components to make it work, there's just Microsoft and Red Hat," he claimed.

Whitehurst went further, saying that, while Microsoft has taken a Microsoft-centric strategy with Azure, other cloud providers will end up running Red Hat's software as their basic core stack.

"I believe we have the only reasonable solution for customers to run production applications in a cloud environment in a supported way," he said.

However, Whitehurst conceded that Microsoft's Azure has a big advantage from a developer viewpoint, in that it has an application programming interface that allows code to be developed using tools such as Visual Studio and published to the cloud, without the developer having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

When questioned on what Red Hat and the open source community is doing to offer comparable capabilities, Whitehurst said to "watch this space" and hinted that announcements around this may be coming at the Red Hat Summit this month.

Meanwhile, cloud is also going to cause an upheaval in the business model for software vendors in the future, according to Whitehurst. This is because most of the functionality of a typical application goes unused, regardless of the licence fee the customer has paid, and many organisations end up paying for more licences than they actually need.

"As soon as you go to a usage-based model, where you pay for what you actually use, you are looking at significant changes in revenue models for a lot of software companies," he said.