Open-source software company Red Hat, Inc, is highly involved with the growth and development of OpenStack. The company promotes the open-source SaaS as the standard platform to build open and scalable clouds.

In an interview with Margaret Dawson, global product marketing at Red Hat, during OpenStack Summit in Austin, TX, Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, discussed her move to the Red Hat team and the advantages of OpenStack for the enterprise.

The reasons for transition

For Dawson, her transition to Red Hat was a perfect match because of what the company is doing on the cloud level, but also at the entire stack.

“I think a lot of people think of Red Hat as Linux, but when you look at what we have built out over the last four or five years, we actually have a complete portfolio now all the way up through a unified management platform, middleware with JBoss, and culturally it’s a great fit,” she said.

The drivers making it fit

According to Dawson, the company focus is showing how OpenStack is proven in the enterprise. She feels there are still many questions surrounding the use of OpenStack, such as can it scale, is it proven, is it in production, and she said the proof is in the company’s key customers’ announcements this week at the show.

In the beginning of the OpenStack project, it was driven by virtualization, and Dawson said this is a key sticking point for her. “You have to look at why they were looking at virtualization first,” she said. “It’s understandable … because it was heavily deployed already, people knew it, they trusted it … but we had to move beyond virtualization to get that scalability, economics and agility that we need as we were looking at these cloud native and mobile workloads.”

The benefits for the enterprise

What Dawson feels is a big benefit of OpenStack for enterprise customers is: “The important thing to remember is what we do, and what true OpenStack, open clouds, are doing is those APIs are the same.” She said that it’s about how OpenStack interacts with other solutions, and as long as they stay the same, you will have better interoperability.

The interview also covered what Dawson sees as the reason behind customer hesitancy to move to the cloud and where OpenStack will be driving enterprise adoption.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit — Austin. And make sure to weigh in during theCUBE’s live coverage at the event by joining in on CrowdChat.

Photo by SiliconANGLE