Sunday 2nd of May, Euranova is at Valencia, Spain, for the Red Hat EMEA partner summit. The ceremony was opened by Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO in a keynote on the open source opportunity. The key message in the keynote was that every three years we can see an inflexion point in IT, in which business models, technologies and the delivery model completely change. In these last years we have seen this inflexion and arrival of virtualization, cloud and social networking. This keynote described how this point influences the IT and how it brings new challenges. The keynote was organized in three sections: (1) the problem, (2) The Red Hat business and (3) The solution.
The problem
Nowadays, at home people are used to surf on facebook, twitter, to use google services, but when they come at work they can see the huge gap between home and work applications. We expect to have the same user experience at work as we have on Facebook, twitter, google, etc. with the same price. For the Red Hat CEO, the new challenges of CTOs are to compete with Facebook, twitter and google of this world, they are the new competitors. They have to achieve the same user experience and for the same price.
The Red Hat business
For Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat bridges the gap between the open source and the enterprise. He sees the open source as a development model and not a business model. An efficient way to create and manage innovation, the power of the communities to create innovative softwares. The role of Red Hat is to create value from Open Source by “making stable and secure” open source projects making them consumable by enterprises. As a result they benefit of the innovative power of the communities while relying on commercial support, documentation and consulting.
The solution
The solution for CTOs having to compete with facebook, twitter and google of this world is then given by Red Hat according to Jim. Red Hat does not sell software, but a stream of innovation from open source to enterprises. With the complete coverage of IT requirements (Server/desktop virtualisation, Hypervisor, OS, cluster of OS, middleware, integration solution, Messaging, etc.) Red Hat wants to give to enterprises the ability to compete with the best service providers by delivering the best of bread technologies from the Open Source.