At the conclusion of the Red Hat Summit in Boston today, Red Hat Inc.’s chief executive officer, Jim Whitehurst, could be forgiven if he was feeling a little weary from being hugged.

He was embraced by IBM Corp., whose own top executive, Ginni Rometty, took the stage and promised to keep Whitehurst’s company independent after shelling out $34 billion last year to buy it. Yet, perhaps even more surprising was Microsoft Corp.’s own embrace, which came from CEO Satya Nadella who personally traveled to Boston and announced general availability of Red Hat’s OpenShift on his company’s Azure cloud.

“How monumental was that?” asked John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the conclusion of the Red Hat Summit in Boston. “The power of Nadella’s presence here was unmistakable, and so was the message that has sent to this community.”

Walls was joined by Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, and they discussed Microsoft’s announcement, its meaning for the open-source community, and continued influence of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Proprietary is passé

The message is that the world of proprietary technology is changing fast and customers expect to see open-source solutions. What made Nadella’s personal visit to the Red Hat event monumental was that such a partnership would have been unthinkable five years ago, when open-source was seen as a threat to proprietary dominance.

Now, Red Hat’s leader, with 13,400 employees, has found himself being embraced by the chief executive of an iconic software company with 10 times the workforce of his own firm.

“The Satya Nadella-led Microsoft is a very different Microsoft than what it was before he was on board,” Miniman noted. “Linux and Red Hat were the enemy, and Windows was THE solution, and they were going to bake everything into it. Their customers are now living in a heterogeneous multicloud world, and they are saying, ‘You need to work together.’”

Aside from major tech company partnerships, and the latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this week’s other significant story was OpenShift and its growing influence in the enterprise world, according to the analysts.

“The highlight for me this week really was OpenShift,” Miniman said. “It is the delivery mechanism for containerization and container cluster management, and Red Hat has a leadership position in that space.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: Red Hat Summit