As the Red Hat Summit 2017 conference began today in Boston, Massachusetts, Paul Cormier (pictured), president of products and technology, Red Hat Software, at Red Hat Inc., spoke to attendees during his keynote about the new trending themes this year for customers. Moving from concerns about cost, security and automation, customers are more interested in developing a cloud strategy and the pace of innovation.

“In the previous years, people were really test-driving a lot of the cloud and the hybrid technologies. And now as they actually start to move to the next phase, and they have to stitch it into their environment, that’s where we get real,” said Cormier.

Cormier spoke to Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Red Hat Summit to discuss changing customer needs.

It’s all about the app

The change in customer expectations has brought about innovation in Red Hat’s technology portfolio, which is all open source. The company is working with customers to solve real-world problems in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, and there is a need to support the diverse nature of all customer deployments.

Developing the cloud strategy is more important now that different departmental groups are moving applications to the public cloud and spending resources on it. Cormier finds that the Chief Intelligence Officer gets involved at this point to align what he calls five different islands to determine how the cloud will fit into the overall strategy. At that point for the CIO, the only way to move to the cloud is through a hybrid solution, he stated.

To pull together the five islands, Cormier explained that there are two things. The first point he made was that so much has moved to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a cloud platform, and that is above the application. “We’re not building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure. We’re building infrastructure for the applications. Applications run on Linux, so the first step is getting a common operating environment for the application,” he said.

Secondly, with Red Hat OpenShift, an open-source container application platform, there is now the infrastructure to maintain, support, deploy and manage the application. He believes this is the hybrid world manageable secure, but Linux RHEL’s the key because that’s the application layer and he points out that apps don’t run on hypervisors they run on operating systems and containers.

Secondly, with Red Hat OpenShift, an open-source container application platform, there is now the infrastructure to maintain, support, deploy and manage the application layer. He believes this makes the hybrid world manageable and secure. But the real key is Linux RHEL, where the applications reside. He pointed out that this is critical because apps don’t run on hypervisors; they run on operating systems and containers.

Cormier explained that Amazon Web Services is bringing connection points back into OpenShift, now allowing applications to run either on-premise or in the AWS cloud.

“Now the island you’re running is an actual system. It’s spanning across the hybrid world being managed and orchestrated from one place,” Cormier said.

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. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over the content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.) 

Photo: SiliconANGLE