As a leader in the open-source community, Red Hat Inc. remains profitable because of the company’s ability to identify the best projects and create a culture that rewards risk and allows some measure of failure.

That’s according to Jim Whitehurst (pictured), president and chief executive officer at Red Hat, who provides a vision of collaboration. During his keynote at this year’s Red Hat Summit, he dedicated time to explaining that it is important to create a safe environment for people to take risks and not be afraid of failure.

“Innovation’s all about injecting variance in, and there’s no way to inject variance in without making errors. … You certainly want to reward risk-taking and recognize, by definition, some risks aren’t going to play out. And that’s all about culture,” Whitehurst said.

Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, had the opportunity to interview Whitehurst after his keynote to discuss the company culture and how open source will define the future of Red Hat. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Jim Whitehurst as its Guest of the Week.

Identifying what’s open and what’s profitable

Red Hat expects momentum with OpenStack that will deliver growth over the next couple of years. The company is considered one of the top three cloud computing stocks to buy in 2017 due to its foundation and a long-term growth strategy that includes upcoming opportunities with No. 1 Amazon Web Services.  

“So this really started off with a breakfast Andy [Jassy, chief operating officer of AWS] and I had in January. … We said, ‘Why don’t we think about what is a net-new offering … but what can we do that is like, wow, actually change the life of some people who are using our technologies,’” Whitehurst said.

The result of the brainstorming session was that OpenShift customers will now be able to leverage the thousands of services AWS offers. This benefits many of OpenShift’s customers — which for regulatory, privacy or economic reasons run on-premise — who will now have the opportunity to take advantage of the AWS services portfolio. Red Hat will manage all support for its customers, even AWS-related issues. The offering will be available by fall 2017. 

AWS will now have exposure to OpenShift customers along with hundreds of thousands of developers. So now developers will be able to access all the innovation AWS provides without necessarily being “all in” on cloud, according to Whitehurst,

Along with strategic partnerships with other technology companies, Whitehurst believes the secret to the company’s success with the open-source ecosystem is probably the reverse of what most people would think.

“One of the reasons that I think that we’ve been able to navigate a whole set of fairly significant transitions in technologies is that we don’t select technology; we select communities. … We looked and observed that OpenStack had built the biggest user base,” he explained.

He also noted that Red Hat’s interest in Kubernetes containers today versus Diego or Swarm or the other container orchestrators is due to the size of community it was building.

Merging open source with enterprise needs

“We don’t just glom on, we actually can get in and contribute ourselves, but we will look more [at] what are the best communities and let’s get involved,” Whitehurst said.

Working with the open-source community is critical to Whitehurst, but customers are the underlying reason Red Hat takes advantage of open technologies.

“Our overall mission is, there are enterprise customers here with a set of challenges, and there’s all this phenomenal innovation happen in open-source communities. So how do we build a bridge between those?” Whitehurst asked.

The company creates a product out of open-source projects. They develop the architecture and processes, as well as pass it through its Open Innovation Labs; however, the focus is testing the technologies that will solve enterprise problems.  

This mindset is what drives the container platform products. The goal is to run stateful applications, because while Whitehurst thinks it is great to talk about scale-out and cloud-native, but most enterprise customers aren’t there yet.

“Go talk to any CIO, and 99.9 percent out there have an application portfolio that is stateful. And so we think about those and drive those needs,” he said.

This is the reason why Red Hat is the second-largest contributor to Kubernetes, an open-source system for managing containerized applications, he added.

“It’s not just because we’re nice people. It’s because we’re trying to drive enterprise needs into these projects. I do think the technologies will merge, and the products we’re putting out help enterprises consume open source in a way that is actually value-adding,” Whitehurst concluded.

Watch the complete video interview 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. sponsored this Red Hat Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE