The Red Hat Summit, celebrating its 10^th anniversary this week, is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Continuing its commitment to live coverage of tech events, SilconANGLE’s theCUBE is there, hosted by SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier.

One aspect of the cloud revolution we are currently in the midst of and that is little discussed centers around the federal government and their strategies aimed at cloud adoption and deployment. Joining Furrier to discuss this topic are Jarid Cottrell and Nirmal Mehta of Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that primarily works with public sector clientele.

To kick off the conversation, Furrier asks if Cottrell might shed some light on the current focus government agencies have with regard to embracing cloud computing, especially when issues such as security and compliance remain significant priorities. Cottrell commented how maturity in cloud technology crosses all levels. Some agencies are only now in the planning stages, while others have already deployed and are working on their next strategies within the platform.

“A lot of drivers come around money,” Cottrell notes. “They have a lot of backend systems they are trying to fix. But with the emergence of a new workforce we are seeing different needs and buying patterns that will emerge.”

The future of open source in the public sector is, in the opinion of Mehta, entering an exciting period because of an increasing understanding of what cloud is and the advancement of open source technologies, especially those around the automation of elasticity and orchestration. “We are seeing the cloud is finally becoming what it should be,” Mehta states.

Red Hat is positioned well to help people to adopt and deploy onto cloud platforms, working seamlessly, Mehta says, with emerging players in the PaaS market like AWS and Google. “Understanding of costs for platform options will, over time, allow internal customers [within organizations] to migrate and adopt Cloud platform computing.”

Booz Allen, early on, recognized the importance of OpenStack. Even just a couple of years ago, the infrastructure was receiving only limited attention. Now, according to Mehta, interest has exploded around OpenStack in just the last four to five months because it is finally a market-ready product that has been vetted. “2014 will be the year for OpenStack,” Mehta predicted.

Cottrell, echoing Mehta, cites the imminent success of OpenStack and other open source projects as being directly related to having a big organization like Red Hat behind them. “OpenStack and other open source is less scary when you have a big name like Red Hat behind it,” he said.

The conversation turned towards the difference in procurement planning between private and public sector customers. “Cloud has changed the time-to-value,” Furrier states.

As an example, he notes how just a few years ago the concept of a massive deployment cycle has yielded to a more accelerated process in the private sector. However, with recent large scale government projects not kicking off exactly as was envisioned, Furrier wanted to know if the limitations of the government procurement process could be overcome to give confidence to the citizenry that the government knows what they are doing.

“The biggest problem in government,” stated Cottrell, “is how they buy. I think like most big procurements, the $4 to $6 million dollar rollouts will take a couple of years.” He continued, “The procurement model used by the government likely won’t change. But [Booz and Allen] can try to help accelerate it.”

Wrapping up the interview, Furrier asks both Mehta and Cottrell to share what they feel is the importance of the Red Hat Summit.

“For us around the cloud perspective, without open source,” states Cottrell, “Cloud isn’t going to be successful.

Mehta believes attending the Red Hat Summit is important for looking forward at where the open source community will be going. “I think this show helps us to see what the future will be.”

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