Defying traditional business models, Red Hat Inc. has thrived in its pure-play open source software business, reaching $2.4 billion in annual sales and a market capitalization of more than $15 billion.

“Open source is the only model,” claimed Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer at Red Hat Inc., during today’s Red Hat Summit’s kickoff keynote address.

Whitehurst said open source is the computing environment of the future, as it can place any application on any footprint, anywhere.

During the keynote, Red Hat focused on successful customer use cases in healthcare and banking and new product demonstrations, including the new Red Hat OpenShift.io.

Customer Success Stories

The keynote’s first featured use case focused on a large health care group that needed to modernize application development for more than 10,000 developers, across half a dozen countries.

“Without changing the mindsets of our developers, we were never going to impact the transformation that we want to have and drive the benefits that our business needs,” said John Hodgson, senior director of IT program management at Optum Inc., explaining how the organization realized it needed change.

His company implemented Red Hat OpenShift, an open-source container application platform, one year ago, working closely with the Red Hat Team. Hodgson reported that the environment has been 100 percent stable for more than six months.

The second use case featured Barclays Bank Plc, a U.K. financial services firm with 355 years of history.

“Our constant evolution is essential,” said Kieran Broadfoot, chief technical officer of hosting at Barclays.

The company began deploying cloud-based technologies in 2015 with Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack. Today, Barclays runs more than 500 applications in its cloud. “We couldn’t be happier with our progress to date,” Broadfoot said.

Demonstrations

During the keynote, Red Hat emphasized how businesses are looking to move their existing technology forward, but they wonder what to do with their existing investments in legacy platforms, such as WebLogic and WebSphere.

“They want a path to the future,” said James Faulkner, technology evangelist at Red Hat Inc. For developers, that future means Linux containers and OpenShift, he stated.

Faulkner performed a six-minute demo for the keynote, taking an existing, monolithic, mission-critical, Java Enterprise Edition application to the cloud, with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, application migration toolkit and OpenShift.

For developers, Red Hat has found there’s “an overgrowing abundance of choice, so that developers … lack confidence in choice,” said Todd Mancini, senior principal product manager at Red Hat Inc. He said Red Hat wanted to do something about it, creating a method to get developers on track instantly and simply. So Red Hat OpenShift.io was developed — a free, end-to-end, cloud-native development experience — where a developer (or a whole team) and an internet browser can get started instantly.

Mancini performed a stack analysis report demonstration, showing how OpenShift.io performs a full analysis on each run, adding insights to operations.

While teams are focusing development around APIs, “building an API is just the first step in a successful API program,” said Keith Babo, principal product manager at Red Hat. In order to get a view into APIs, he demonstrated an API portal and how it provides all the information developers need to discover and integrate their APIs.

Watch the complete keynote video below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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