Red Hat has been instrumental in the evolution of Linux from a geek-friendly, hacker-based open source OS to a full Tier 1 viable enterprise solution. At Red Hat Summit 2014, John Furrier and Stu Miniman of The CUBE talked with Jim Totton, VP & GM of Platform Business Unit at Red Hat about Red Hat as a platform and how it is becoming the platform of choice for on-premise, virtualization and ultimately the cloud.

First, Totton began by explaining what “platform” means to Red Hat. It is first and foremost the operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and it is present in four spheres:

1. physical deployment
2. traditional virtualization environments
3. private cloud (i.e. open stack providing agility in the data center)
4. public cloud

The OS should “light up the hardware”, Totton said. Red Hat is working closely with Intel to ensure Linux is able to maximize the architecture and translate the power of the hardware throughout the entire stack. In doing so, they have created a rock solid, stable platform with a 10-year life cycle.

Red Hat is working closely with Open Stack to make sure RHEL is well integrated as both a cloud host and a guest, providing interoperability and the same reliability customers expect across all environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also nearing a release date. It is currently in beta and has been downloaded over 10,000 times. Customers and community developers have provided feedback and bug fixes, and Red Hat is delivering a release candidate this week. The company has added numerous tools to its 3,000-package library, including some that help automate server provisioning for large deployments. Its partnership with CentOS has also helped to create a more stable enterprise product that is also open source and freely available to the community through CentOS’s offering.

According to Totton, Red Hat holds a 65.7 percent share of the Linux enterprise market, and half of the world’s financial transactions are conducted on top of RHEL. Red Hat, he said, will continue to contribute to the open source community and “create value for end customers”. You can hear more of what he had to say by watching the entire interview right here at SiliconANGLE.com.