New Red Hat CEO Thrives on Channel Partner Relationships
… Linux. And so we’ve really moved from that commodity play to an innovation play. The whole market has moved that way, too. It has been quite a trip.
CF: What’s the next big thing for Red Hat and its partners and customers?
PC: I’ve said in one of my talks that for about 30% of our customers, their cloud strategy is hybrid. That’s growing every day. It’s in and around hybrid, we’re really in the beginning of hybrid. When cloud first started, the cloud guys were telling everyone that every application was going to move to their cloud tomorrow. We knew that was impractical, and even they all know that’s impractical now. So what you’re seeing is customers stitching things in public cloud as part of their IT environment and not as their entire infrastructure.
CF: Is all of this surprising to you?
PC: I say all the time — hybrid is the new data center. It’s absolutely true. It’s all kinds of new services around that, from storage services to messaging services. Middleware and all of these new services are built around that. Stitching all these different platforms together that are running in some data centers and others in clouds, etc., it brings a lot of power, but it’s really complicated.
One of the fastest growing things around this is automation. Because you can have a really powerful solution, but you’re going to need very good management and very good automation. Those are two big areas around the hybrid space, but it’s going to be all around this hybrid platform. We’re in a 10-year cycle here. Even where we’ve gotten to today, with 17 years of RHEL, that’s not gone; that’s the foundation of what we’re doing. It’s not like we were in RHEL and now we’re not in RHEL. It’s still driving all that.”