The buzz of digital transformation in the technology sector has created a culture of rapid evolution, but many businesses are still working through the early challenges of modern cloud computing. As companies race to modernize their operations and remain competitive in a new age of software development, IT partners like Red Hat Inc. are providing tools and resources to help them reach their goals.

“You will not be able to innovate and disrupt … if you’re not able to get to those technologies and innovations quickly and be able to adapt,” said Margaret Dawson (pictured, right), vice president of portfolio product marketing at Red Hat Inc. “OpenStack is a part of a much bigger … solution that enterprises have … to transform and be a digital leader.”

Dawson and John Allessio (pictured, left), vice president of services at Red Hat, are working together on a program designed to demistify hybrid cloud.

Allessio and Dawson spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. They discussed the evolution of digital transformation and how Red Hat is helping customers make the transition smoothly. (* Disclosure below.)

Taking utilization to the next level

Demand for OpenStack’s open-source software has increased considerably over the last year, and the types of projects being pursued have grown in complexity, according to Allessio. The 36 percent year-over-year increase in projects worldwide has seen a surge in multicloud requests, he explained.

“We started to see … customers building a hybrid cloud solution, using OpenStack as private cloud infrastructure [and] OpenShift … to deploy applications in containers. … So we created a solution … called Containers on Cloud … combining these products together,”  he said.

In addition to new support products, Red Hat is assisting customers through their cloud journeys with labs and training programs that allows businesses to teach and innovate within the community. “We’re combining developers … business leaders, infrastructure, architects, who all come together in a very typical six-week kind of agile methodology. …We’ve seen … two apps at the end of six or eight weeks,” Dawson said.

Thirty percent of organizations still do not actually have a clear cloud strategy, according to Dawson. Red Hat is focusing on this segment of its customer base to ensure all businesses are keeping pace with rapid cloud developments.

“We need to get to the point where we’re all mature in this and help our customers … work on interoperability, and ease of use, and management … so that the consumption and the utilization can really go to the next level,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of OpenStack Summit. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE