The final keynote address during Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, featured several of Red Hat Inc.’s technology partners, including Lenovo Group Ltd. and once-rival Microsoft, as well as stories of integration and mutual innovation.

“Open source is the only development model to solve the complex problems of the hybrid world,” Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer at Red Hat, said during the summit. “Organizations that figure out how to create a context that allow individuals to act in a collective way that can learn and continue to march forward are the organizations that will be successful.”

While at one time, some technology companies wanted to “rule the world,” in today’s vast hybrid universe, it’s pretty much acknowledged that certain organizations do things better than others. So why not partner up and make a good thing great?

Partnering for mutual success

Lenovo, the hardware company known mainly for its ThinkPad technology, is branching out into providing data center services around the world. Today’s chief information officers don’t want to be encumbered by high-priced legacy service agreements. Instead, they are looking to partner on open source and aggressively move forward with the most cost-effective technology, according to keynote participant Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president and president of the Data Center Group at Lenovo.

“The internet of today is people to people, it’s moving to people to machine, but it’s going to move to machine to machine,” Skaugen predicted.

The increasing speed and rapid expansion of data is why it works best for Lenovo to partner and co-engineer with Red Hat. The company has participated in 12 OpenStack projects in areas such as weather prediction and medical research, Skaugen stated.

Rivals yesterday, partners today

Perhaps one of the most interesting partnership is with Microsoft, as they were fierce rivals for many years, fighting for dominance in the software field. But that was then; this is now.

“Part of this partnership is enabling a holistic solution, it’s not just about great technology, it’s about making you successful,” said Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure and security marketing at Microsoft, during the keynote.

She explained that hybrid cloud cannot be looked at as a short-term solution; it needs to be thought of as a durable approach that is secured and managed in a holistic way. That’s where Microsoft and Red Hat work together, providing consistency, durability, efficiency and security in the hybrid cloud.

As part of the friendly partnership, a representative from each company ran several demos to show the ease and smoothness of different capabilities in Red Hat OpenShift: a SQL server container, an enterprise Java app, a .NET microservice, a Skype bot, and an Internet Information Services app running in Windows container.

“What is great is that Java and .NET can coexist in the same pane of glass that OpenShift provides,” said Jim Zimmerman, senior software development engineer, technical evangelist and development, at Microsoft.

The demonstrations showed the “freedom and choice to develop and deploy where and when you want to,” according to Steve Pousty, lead developer advocate, OpenShift Online, at Red Hat.

‘Containergeddon’ in the banking industry

For KeyBank, a 190-year-old financial services company based in Cleveland, Ohio, its many successful acquisitions of other banks were giving them technological heartaches. “Every time we tried to fail something over, it just wasn’t working,” said John Rzeszotarski, director of DevOps, enterprise technology services, at KeyBank, during the keynote.

After giving it much thought, he and his team decided on three areas of focus: containers, automated testing and continuous delivery. Deploying a plan, using Kubernetes and Docker, they were able to avoid the dreaded condition of “containergeddon.”

“We were able to put 10 production releases into production with zero defects, during the highest volume we’d ever had, and it affected no one. That’s the power of OpenShift,” Rzeszotarski said.

As for the effects of open source on innovation, Paul Cormier, president of products and technology, Red Hat Software, at Red Hat, was adamant during the keynote: “If there’s ever been any question that open source and Linux aren’t driving the next generation of innovation, then you haven’t been to the Red Hat Summit, especially this year. We’ve had a year here that just showed open source going so much beyond Linux,” he 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. 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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