Red Hat, Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst didn’t always think out of the box or encourage debate among staff. As a former COO of Delta Air Lines, Inc., Whitehurst came from a traditional management background. When he joined Red Hat, his approach to management shifted quickly to focus on agility and innovation: both necessary components to managing a business in the information age.

“Whole industries are coming apart and changing,” he said during an interview with theCUBE at Red Hat Summit 2015. “We’re going from horizontal structures to vertical structures. Companies such as Uber and Zipcar are disrupting companies like Ford and GM. Now, companies have to focus on information and analytics; they have to change quickly; and they need to innovate. We know that bureaucracy doesn’t foster innovation. We need a rethink of mindset and management process to focus on agility and innovation rather than just efficiency.”

Companies struggle to adapt to open source

Some of these larger companies struggle to adapt to open source. Whitehurst said that Red Hat’s Atomic Enterprise Platform aims to make open source easy for the enterprise.

“Containers, all the various top management platforms, mobile, all of those things are happening first in open source,” he said. “We recognize that to consume all this innovation, the enterprise needs it packaged in a way that can work for them. That’s why we have the Atomic Platform. It’s a fully manageable platform that can run containers at scale or with OpenShift. It’s one package, one subscription, one set of documentation where you can run a full life cycle DevOps with dozens of open-source projects in a consumable fashion.”

With the arrival of new CFO Frank Calderoni, who comes to Red Hat after a CFO stint at Cisco Systems, Inc., and Red Hat’s overall forward momentum, Vellante wondered if Red Hat could be the smaller fish to thrive among the big whales.

“We’re not about a technology,” said Whitehurst. “We’re about how to apply a production system to categories of technology. Our growth is taking share in established categories.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE