Red Hat isn’t content with merely being the world’s largest enterprise Linux vendor. Now, it wants to become the industry’s leading enterprise cloud vendor as well, and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says he’s going to “win” the market before someone else gets there first.

In a blog post, Whitehurst notes: “We’re in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile. It’s a once-every-twenty-years kind of change. As history has shown us, in the early days of those changes, winners emerge that set the standards for that era – think Wintel in the client-server arena.”

But of course, Red Hat isn’t the only tech company that’s scrambling towards the cloud. According to 451 Research, the market for OpenStack alone will be worth $3.3 billion by 2018, and everyone from EMC Corp., to Hewlett-Packard Company and even smaller players like Canonical Ltd. is desperately vying to get there first.

“The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs,” Whitehurst acknowledged. “But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises’ entire cloud infrastructure.”

To get there, Whitehurst says Red Hat will focus on three key offerings – its CloudForms management platform, its OpenShift PaaS, and OpenStack. However its Jboss middleware and storage solutions will also play a role, helping Red Hat to deliver as much infrastructure as it can.

Red Hat’s renewed cloud focus doesn’t mean it will pay any less attention to Linux. Its just that the greatest challenge lies in the data center itself.

“The original vision for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was simple – to create the best enterprise-class server operating system,” said Whitehurst. “But the community has taken Linux further than any of us could ever have imagined. It now serves as a foundation for the next-generation datacenter.”

Now, Red Hat wants to move forward and concentrate its energies on helping customers to build out their next-gen data centers. “We want to be the undisputed leader in enterprise cloud, and that’s why Red Hat is going to continue to push,” vowed Whitehurst.

photo credit: Ludovic Hirlimann via photopin cc