Red Hat Inc. went to great lengths on Tuesday to deliver a message of partnership with some of the biggest companies in the world, specifically IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. The theme on Wednesday was more customer-focused with a direct message for the tech community at large: Open-source software is growing up and it is beginning to have big impact on major companies worldwide.

“They’re multinational organizations, but they are actually in production on a multicloud, global scale,” John Troyer, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and chief reckoner at TechReckoning, said during the kickoff segment on the second day of the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. “That shows that it’s real, it can be done.”

Troyer was joined at the conference by co-host John Furrier, and they discussed key messages from Wednesday’s customer presentations, Red Hat’s corporate philosophy and the impact of open source on enterprise transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Processing 762 million holiday packages

With the Wednesday morning keynote presentations devoted principally to customer use cases, attendees were presented with ample evidence that Red Hat’s tools for powering hybrid cloud adoption and containerized applications are scaling up quickly. The immigration division for the government of Argentina registered 80 million transits last year and processed more than 2 billion data entries. United Parcel Service used open-source technology to deal with the holiday shipping crush in November and December, processing 762 million packages in less than two months.

UPS has been using Red Hat’s OpenShift platform to migrate containerized workloads to the cloud and provide its operators with accurate data from disparate sources. “The ability to give our people on the ground the most up-to-date data gives them the ability to make more informed decisions,” said Nick Costides, global vice president of information technology at UPS. “Red Hat fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy our systems.”

New playbook for disruption

Use cases such as those offered by Argentina and UPS reveal an important shift taking place within the enterprise information technology world. The tech playbook for disruption, previously a process of “out with the old, in with the new,” is being rewritten.

“With containers and Kubernetes and the role that OpenShift is playing, you’re seeing these new segments carry legacy [systems],” Furrier said. “You can bring in the new with cloud native and containerize the old… so the pressure to rip and replace is really taken away. This is a huge dynamic that should create great value for Red Hat.”

Scale in information technology is important, but so is speed. A Red Hat customer presentation on Wednesday morning involved Lufthansa Technik AG, one of the world’s leading providers for aircraft maintenance and repair. Tobias Mohr, Lufthansa’s head of technology and infrastructure, described how his division had 100 days to develop a digital twin, or complete virtualized interactive model, of an aircraft.

Using OpenShift and other Red Hat technologies, Mohr and his team had most of the code written in less than five days, allowing them to move quickly to meet a tough deadline. “The things we’re seeing on the [Red Hat] stage would have taken an army of programmers years to do,” Troyer noted.

Red Hat’s own playbook follows a philosophy that is different from many traditional companies. In a nod to the ethos of the open-source community, the firm’s culture is couched in a belief in bottom-up organizational change.

Configuration is the new planning

That philosophy was amplified in a blog post released Wednesday morning by Red Hat Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst, prior to his own remarks at the keynote session. As Whitehurst noted in his post, planning is now configuring, prescription is replaced by enablement, and execution is transformed into engagement.

“It’s basically a framework that pushes a lot of power down to your people,” Troyer said. “It’s about transformation, but it’s also about enabling your workforce to get away from planning and react to the situation at hand.”

The signal offered by Whitehurst’s post and his articulation of Red Hat’s approach is that a new chapter is being written in tech’s evolution, one that calls for different ways of designing IT systems for the enterprise. Open-source is both an enabler and a bridge between legacy systems and newer cloud architectures.

“This wave that we’re looking at now, this modern cloud scale wave, is bigger than all the others combined,” Furrier said. “It sets up the perfect storm for best of the new and interoperating with multiple clouds with legacy. It’s the first time I’ve seen clear visibility into that kind of conversation.”

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

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE