Over the previous two days, SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE has broadcast live from this year’s Red Hat Summit, held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The final guest joining co-hosts Stu Miniman and John Furrier was the Senior Vice President of the Application Platform Products Business Group for Red Hat, Craig Muzilla. He discussed what he sees as his group’s role in the open source community going forward as well as the singular commitment Red Hat maintains to that community.

Over the past few years the entire industry, according to Muzilla, has been going through a major upheaval and that transformation has centered on Cloud services. “OpenStack is leading that,” he said. “At Red Hat we start with infrastructure and move up the stack. So, we start with architecture and it moves up to middleware and up to OpenStack.”

Previous conversations on this week’s theCUBE broadcast had touched on the concept of a strong architecture being able to ‘light up the hardware.’ With the focus shifting to the Cloud, Furrier asked Muzilla how, through software and DevOps, he planned to ‘light up the Cloud’?

Watch the interview in its entirety here:

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From his answer, it appears Muzilla believes that lighting up the Cloud comes from listening to customers. “We run customer advisory boards and bring in our key customers and ask what’s important.”

From these boards, the collective answer centered on the development of applications. “There is hype and buzz around architecture. But CIO’s want to know how to create and deploy an app quickly,” Muzilla explained.

Another common thread through many of the interviews this week had to do with attracting developers to the open source community in order to maintain viability and relevance in the marketplace. “[Red Hat] embraced the concept of letting people develop in what we call ‘Open Choice’,” Muzilla commented. Developers are free to write in any language they choose, providing a variety of choices to developers in how they develop applications.

Red Hat often fosters and curates within the open source community by looking past projects that are receiving copious amounts of attention and identifying underserved areas of development. “We look at various categories where there might not be a lot of innovation happening and we will start a project,” Muzilla stated.

This led Miniman to question whether or not the acquisition strategy of both open source and proprietary projects ever stirred waves in the open source community.

“First and foremost,” Muzilla responded, “we are an open source company. Everything is open source. When we look [at possible acquisitions] we have to make sure we can do it in open source.” Even with the acquisition of a proprietary project, Red Hat drills down into it to discover if it possesses open source DNA. “Not all of our acquisitions are open source. But we have to be able to create a community around it and take it open source,” he said.

Rounding out the conversation, Furrier asked Muzilla just why he thinks the Red Hat Summit is so important today, in its 10^th year.

“There is so much change in the industry right now,” Muzilla offered. “It’s an opportunity for people to learn and contribute.” Muzilla pointed out that there are conversations occurring at this summit about concepts that didn’t even exist two years ago. “I haven’t seen this much change so fast since maybe the early 1990’s with the web,” he concluded.

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