Webcasting live in San Francisco from the Red Hat Summit 2014, John Furrier and Stu Miniman welcomed to theCUBE Ashesh Badani, Vice President and General Manager of OpenShift at Red Hat.

Furrier started by asking Badani for a quick update on OpenShift.

“We started three years ago with OpenShift Online, a public platform service run off Amazon EC2, with a phenomenal growth rate of 152 percent per year… we feel pretty confident with the progress made so far, with the amount of adoption seen in the online public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), as well as our Enterprise technology,” commented Badani.

The role of the PaaS

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As noted during the keynotes at Red Hat Summit, Badani pointed out that “the application is king.”

“There’s a lot of energy focused on the innovation that’s happening at the application level,” Badani said. “We are focused on ensuring that all the work that happens underneath, whether it is PaaS or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is as commoditized as possible. The amount of time and money the Enterprise is going to put to work is on the application itself.”

“Red Hat, in its true open source way, has entered a technology collaboration with Docker. We began the process around September of last year and we are very active amongst the Docker community. The announcement that we made today was that we are taking some of the Docker technology and making the applications that we have around OpenShift portable across environments,” explained Badani.

• Working with OpenStack

“So OpenStack is a huge bet for Red Hat,” noted Furrier. “Explain the fit between OpenStack and the past layer of your offering.”

“The open source and the OpenStack teams work very closely together,” started Badani. “There is a project called HEAT which allows for orchestration between OpenStack-based projects and multiple composite cloud applications. Numerous customers are interested in running OpenShift on OpenStack, taking advantage both of the efficiency of the infrastructure service as well as the application flexibility that runs with the Platform as a Service on top,” said Badani.

We define success by “delighting our customers, our community and our users,” admitted Badani. “All good things will follow from that. As long as we’re doing all things that avoid lock-in, make sure that application infrastructure is flexible and portable, taking cost out of that so that customers can be more successful in the areas where they want to invest in, not only we will be successful, but our users and community also.”

The importance of collaboration

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Badani talked next about the ongoing collaboration process and the new announcements in that department:

“We’ve announced yesterday our technology partnership with Hortonworks, the Hadoop data provider, to ensure that we are able to take the applications that are running on OpenShift and integrate them more closely with some of the technologies that are coming out Hortonworks as well. Our approach to collaboration is a very open one. A lot of companies are valuing that.”

“Red Hat has always done a great job taking an open source project and providing an enterprise version that’s best of breed,” noted Miniman, citing Linux, KVM, and OpenStack. “Does OpenShift fit into that model?” he asked.

“Cisco has gone out and built CVD (Cisco Validated Design), their reference architecture that integrates some of the Cisco technology alongside OpenShift. More announcements from large partners are coming up tomorrow,” hinted Badani. “It is not fair to think of our marketplace as being dominated just by the largest vendors. Our innovation model is one that happens out in the open, along with a very nimble set of partners,” explained Badani.

Watch the entire segment below to find out more about JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift, as well as Badani’s thoughts on a potential collaboration with Microsoft.

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