Red Hat finds its feet in cloud gold rush

Open ... And Shut Cloud computing may be the future, nevertheless it appears to be one fraught with unpredictable downtime and security breaches. That is, it's very much like the bad ol' days of corporate data centres, except that this time Amazon, Salesforce and other cloud providers get the blame when things go wrong - to put it more exactly than one's local IT folks.

Yes, Red Hat. The company isn't known for cloud computing and has at times struggled to articulate what, specifically, its cloud computing strategy is. For some time it as a rule worked in the background, enabling others' public clouds, including Salesforce.com and Fujitsu's cloud.

In a nutshell, Hellekson's explanation boils down to this: Red Hat is going to commoditise competitors' monolithic, winner-take-all cloud approaches that remove complexity however also customer choice, with standardized building blocks that work across physical, virtual and cloud-deployed systems, simplifying IT's task of application delivery and allowing IT to focus on business process efficiencies. Were I to narrow it down even furthermore, I'd use one word: choice. Choice sells, and always has, for Red Hat.

So during proprietary Salesforce.com pot calls the proprietary Oracle kettle black, the best of either comes out looking a very murky hue of charcoal grey. Throw in the cost of proprietary approaches with rampant doubt that cloud computing can deliver serious security and we have a perfect storm for Red Hat's cloud story.

This is the same play book that won so much of the server operating system market for Red Hat, and has put it on course to take a big bite of VMware's virtualization business. It's likely to prove a winner in the cloud, too.

Not that its competitors are standing all in all. As I've noted earlier, VMware is getting aggressive with open source and open approaches to cloud computing, with a lead over Red Hat's OpenShift.

In other words, during Red Hat's strategy has all the trappings of success, "success" likely won't mean global domination. Nevertheless it should help the company reach its then and there billion in annual revenue. I suspect Red Hat likes that "choice" just fine. ®

Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Strobe, a startup that offers an open source framework for building mobile apps. He was formerly chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfresco's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative. His column, Open...and Shut, appears twice a week on The Register.

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