The Red Hat Summit is different than most other vendor shows in the sense that, although it naturally centers on the company and its particular vision for technology, it also places a large emphasis on the ecosystem. And that doesn’t just encompass customers and partners, but the upstream community projects for its solutions and outside strategic industry initiatives as well. James Whitehurst, the president and CEO of the Linux distributor, made a point of that in the opening keynote of the recently concluded event, focusing on two points in particular: how a large organization should go about embracing the open source model and, beyond that,  effectively consuming free software.

A catalyst for open innovation

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Red Hat sees itself as a partner in what Whitehurst refers to as the industrialization of IT, the shift from proprietary IT stacks entirely controlled by individual vendors to commoditized and standardized infrastructure capable of supporting practically any workload with no lock-in.

“No longer is IT about building a true custom stack from the bottom up, it’s about a common infrastructure on which applications can be built, and that’s leading to a massive explosion in the speed and pace of innovation.” Whitehurst highlights.  For CIOs, he continues, the difficulty lies not so much in the complexity of the new technologies hitting the market as in the need to keep up with the ever increasing pace of change while sustaining existing investments and, most importantly, ensuring smooth business operations.

“For traditional enterprises its about how you keep your lights on, how you run your traditional apps and at the same time tap into the pace of this innovation, and when I say innovation I’m not just talking about technology. It’s not just about technology, it’s about systems, it’s about processes, it’s about culture because changing the way we develop and run applications is much more than just the underlying technologies,” Whitehurst explains.

Technology is moving too fast for organizations to have to wait for a proprietary vendor to come up with their own version of the latest breakthrough, he argues, which is why Red Set  makes user traction its primary strategic consideration when it comes to investing in open source technologies rather than making “value judgments” about the specific solutions. The firm positions itself not as a trendsetter but as a catalyst of community innovation, as Whitehurst puts it,  allowing the community to set the direction and dictate the pace. Its involvement in Docker, a fast growing containerization technology for Linux applications, reflects that approach.

“While Red Hat didn’t predict it [the rise of containers], what Red Hat did do is ensure that we’ve been enveloped in the appropriate communities of innovation,”  Whitehurst says. “So if you made a bet on Red Hat and our technologies, you made a bet not on where technology is going, but that we’ve chosen the communities of innovation that are occurring so they are happening within our ecosystem.”

From adoption to consumption

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Since the vendor threw its weight behind Docker last year, the project attracted nearly 400 independent contributors and gained several hundred thousand additional users, a testament to the potential of the project and containers in general. It also demonstrates how far a stable and fully supported consumption model can go towards making open source technology viable for the enterprise, according to Whitehurst, which is where Red Hat comes in. The company is doing with Docker what it has done with Linux: bringing order to open source chaos.

“Look at Linux. Linux is the single most chaotic open source project out there: thousands of contributors, strong opinions pulling it in multiple directions, hundreds of distributors,” he highlights. “But  some of the most mission-critical systems in the world run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: stock exchanges, trading platforms, nuclear submarines – things that are way too mission-critical to even virtualize on top of an innovation model that’s the most chaotic in the world.”

The way Whitehurst sees it, effectively channeling the potential of the open source movement will be key to facilitating the  once-in-a-decade paradigm shift that he believes  will emerge from the perfect storm of cloud computing, Big Data, mobile and social that is sweeping through corporate IT today. IBM, one of Red Hat’s most important partners and the lead sponsor of the event, has the same position on where the market is going.

Not going it alone

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For the second part of the keynote, Whitehurst  turns over the podium to Deepak Advani, the head of Big Blue’s Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure division.. The executive has more than 20 years of industry experience in various management positions, including a brief stint as IBM’s very first director of Linux strategy in the late 1990s. The operating system has evolved unrecognizably since then, he reflects, paving the way for open source and proving that free software can be viable for mission-critical workloads.

Red Hat Summit 2014 keynote. Source: SiliconANGLE

Today, a different but equally disruptive revolution is taking place. By making previously inaccessible functionality available for everyday enterprise users, cloud computing and analytics are accelerating the pace of business, according to Advani, drastically changing the competitive landscape in the process.

Citing an IBM survey, he notes that “for the last couple of years in a row, CEOs are saying that the number one factor is technology. Technology is driving a lot of change, it’s creating opportunities to build up competitive advantage – it’s maybe the only thing that enables companies to build competitive advantage.” This priority shift is putting unprecedented pressure on IT organizations to deliver increased flexibility and breadth of capabilities in-house while ensuring data security and compliance – all on a tight budget.

In response, CIOs are also turning to the cloud and analytics in pursuit of the same agility that is pulling in their line-of-business counterparts, but simply being able to consume resources on-demand and is not enough when building next-generation applications.  Advani says that enterprise developers need broader access to the stack than ever before, both in terms of APIs and data, as well the ability to leverage this functionality across every platform and system in their organizations’ increasingly heterogeneous environments.

“When something new comes along, the old doesn’t always go away,” he details. “The world is heterogeneous, and we believe that the world for the foreseeable future will continue to be heterogeneous. Giving clients choice is really important, interoperability is really important, and speed becomes really important.”

All that can only be achieved through open standards, Advani says, which is why IBM has partnered with Red Hat on OpenStack and even launched a community initiative of its own.  Announced in August 2013, the OpenPOWER Foundation makes components of Big Blue’s Power Architecture, like processor specifications and firmware, accessible to partners seeking to build their own custom servers as part of the emerging hyperscale trend.