Software is taking hold of the world, and open-source — with companies like Red Hat Inc. as a major proponent — is becoming the de facto way in which software is developed.

The managed services model, under which many of Red Hat’s open-source software partners operate, has allowed the company to build profitable businesses around its offerings.

“Look at a company like Mongo; they’ve heavily pivoted toward the managed service,” said Stu Miniman (pictured), director of market insights, cloud platforms, at Red Hat. “It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It’s one of the things I spend most of my time talking on.”

Miniman spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin during the Red Hat Summit event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They recapped the event, touching on key takeaways and product and partnership announcements. (* Disclosure below.)

The enduring culture at Red Hat

Much like the company’s dedication to open-source software, the internal culture at Red Hat leans more toward individual autonomy than rigid hierarchy, according to Miniman.

“Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that care more about the project than they do the business,” he said. “But there’s the overall view as to where we participate and where we are productive, because we’re not creating IP. It’s all open source.”

Part of that culture is the stark contrast between Red Hat and IBM, its parent company. While the latter has certain privileges in addition to ownership, Red Hat still maintains an overarching autonomy in most things, including product development, company culture, and go-to-market strategies, according to Miniman.

As an open-source company, Red Hat inevitably makes it into millions of computers globally. Every so often, though, groundbreaking partnerships are struck with exciting ramifications — such as the partnership between Red Hat and General Motors Co.

“I love the partnership announcement with General Motors today, because not every company has the need for software-driven electric vehicles all over the place,” Miniman said. “But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We’re working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud and the data center; it’s that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats.”

Red Hat is also throwing its hat into the cloud computing ring, including with the OpenShift Database Access tool, which greatly reduces the complexity for developers running and working with multiple open-source databases simultaneously.

On the Kubernetes and containerization side of things, the next few years have to focus on automation and simplification, according to Miniman.

“It’s not enough to just say, ‘Hey, we’ve got APIs.’ We have API Sprawl today, so it’s mainly about building that ecosystem,” he said. “We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud-native ecosystem, and help our customers move faster.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit event:

(*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE