Scott Musson, Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances at Red Hat, showed up for an interview with theCUBE, talking to John Furrier and Stu Miniman about Red Hat’s strategy regarding crucial partnerships for the ecosystem, during the Red Hat Summit 2014 taking place this week in San Francisco.

Musson narrated the recent meetup between 22 people representing 15 companies, who debated for five hours what can Red Hat do better to be a partner in the ecosystem. “The reality is we are doing well in a partnering model but beyond one-on-one relationships it gets a little more complex,” said Musson.

Red Hat Alliance : Strategy & Disruptions

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“If you look traditionally at the Red Hat partner model, we have been, historically, an infrastructure-centric company: Linux tied to servers. A few years back the server vendors were core to our partner strategy. Fast forward, we have a broad portfolio, driving solutions into the cloud, a lot of disruptions going on,” Musson started.

“We’re not abandoning anyone. They are all strategic partners, but we have to broaden the aperture and the portfolio to make sure we’re addressing customers’ needs. We have to continue to build an ecosystem of partners that can deliver integrated solutions to the market. We are kind of comfortable in that coopetition space,” said Musson, who reminded Furrier about recent partnership announcements from SAP, Dell and Cisco.

“We are looking for partners in the emerging technologies that are really going to align behind Red Hat and Red Hat solution stack.”

“What is your biggest goal this year?” asked Furrier.

Scott Musson nominated two:

1. to continue to grow the core business around JBoss – as this is where they are making their money today
2. be the foundation for new technologies.

Be sure to watch Musson’s full interview below, as he discusses “the best way to partner with Red Hat” and whether or not OpenStack is enterprise-grade.