Red Hat builds the digital transformation autobahn, where developers are king of the road

Red Hat production systems curate community IP into a simplified horizontal platform, paving the way for scaled innovation

In a 2015 conference for financial analysts, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst declared victory in commoditizing the enterprise OS market into RHEL and Windows Server, while outlining Red Hat’s intentions to do the same thing to the (then) emerging PaaS layer with OpenShift.

The closing guest speaker during the Red Hat keynote address at the 2019 summit was Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, who announced Azure Red Hat OpenShift. While it might still be premature to declare victory in fulfilling that aspirational objective from 2015, it certainly can be said that Red Hat has made significant progress in a short period of time.

RHEL and OpenShift represent the curation pillars for open upstream community innovations, coupled with Red Hat’s decades of open-source and service experience to deliver a capabilities-based advantage to its users. Red Hat represents the virtuous cycle of trusted platform delivery, user-contributed innovations, and Red Hat production-grade delivery of those innovations back to the community via a platform layer that is increasingly easier to deploy.

RHEL 8 delivers additional simplicity and automation capabilities to allow operators to better facilitate developer innovation

Red Hat heralds RHEL 8 as a significant improvement over RHEL 7, best illustrated by the fact that the upgrade process to RHEL 8 constitutes a simple point-and-click operation, after which automation can take over the rest of the process in seamless fashion.The latest release is said to be designed for applications to run across open hybrid cloud environments, addressing the enterprise hybrid reality. Before its official release to market at the summit, there were over 40,000 downloads of RHEL 8 in beta, which underscores pent-up demand for the release and also helped Red Hat to enhance the operating system based on invaluable feedback from those beta users.

TBR attended the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Summit, which featured the usual slew of product announcements. This year, the company focused intently on enhancements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and Red Hat OpenShift 4, which are the foundational products for the enterprise. However, more interesting were the general discussions throughout the summit about Red Hat’s business model and cultural uniqueness, which contribute to the company’s success in curating openly sourced IP into enterprise-grade technology products underpinning an ever-increasing share of business software. The value of its people and processes were regularly emphasized by reminding attendees that IBM (NYSE: IBM) is paying $34 billion for a $3.2 billion company that owns no IP.