As Red Hat, Inc.’s offerings become more enterprise-ready — and widely adopted — demands on its projects continue to increase. Ashesh Badani, GM of Cloud Product Strategy at Red Hat, joined theCUBE at RedHat Summit to talk about how its pipeline is structured to deliver reliable results.

“We do a lot of work upstream … in the community,” Badani said. “I’ll use the Linux analogy, because I think that works best here. We have Enterprise Linux, which is used, tried, tested around the world. Large corporations, financial institutions, governments everywhere in the world use that. That’s enterprise-class stable distribution from Red Hat. Upstream from enterprise Linux comes Fedora … and then upstream from that is, if you will, where all the contribution happens.”

Cloud options that give customers flexibility

It also has multiple Cloud options to give customers more flexibility.

“We have OpenShift Enterprise,” Badani said. “You can run it directly on OpenStack … as well as on certified third-party Clouds.”

The company also offers a public Cloud model and just announced “the preview release of OpenShift 3 Dedicated, which is for customers who want to say, you know, I’m really interested in the public Cloud model, but I’d really like some more control over it,” Badani said. “So they can run OpenShift 3 Enterprise, V3, that’s managed by the team that runs OpenShift online ops … over 2.5 million apps have been deployed on that platform since the start.”

Badani then continued the Linux analogy with OpenShift Origin. “That’s the open-source community where all the contributions happen,” he explained. “We take, if you will, distribution of that that we support. Upstream from that … is a series of communities. One of them was Docker. We contribute heavily as a company. We had an OpenShift team in Red Hat into the Docker community.”

Badani also talked about Red Hat’s Cloud strategy. “We like to think about Cloud from a hybrid Cloud perspective. I think increasingly, those distinctions will stop mattering.” He said that many customers say things like, “I’ve got some code. Someone figure out how to containerize it. Someone help me figure out how to run it.” Red Hat wants to be that somebody, Badani said.

The strategy seems to be paying off.

“We’ve been on a journey now for over three years with several customers like FICO, like CISCO, CA,” he said. “And they’ve started with us with DevTest, and now they’re all in production.” Cisco has more than 1,000 apps in production with Red Hat, according to Badani. “If you looked at the presentation from last year, that number was half that.”

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