Red Hat on Wednesday took the wraps off its cloud computing strategy, which revolves around promoting interoperability and application portability.
In a nutshell, Red Hat's cloud strategy includes platform-as-a-service, a JBoss middleware effort to allow open developer choice and moves aimed to put the company in the middle of cloud applications.
Paul Cormier, president of Red Hat's products and technology business, said Red Hat is aiming to align all of its products with cloud computing. In Cormier's view, there are only two companies that can provide a stack of cloud-enabled enterprise software---Red Hat and Microsoft.
The takeaway: Red Hat is positioning itself as the open source cloud provider and as an alternative to Microsoft's Azure platform. The company touted a cloud computing win with Dreamworks Animation. Red Hat's take: No customer should be locked into a cloud platform.
Red Hat executives said that companies will be increasingly managing hybrid cloud infrastructure. The company's plan is to be in the middle of those hybrid environments (statement). It should be noted though that the cloud governance game that Red Hat is entering also includes a bevy of other players ranging from BMC Software to CA to Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
At a higher level, Red Hat is also aiming to box in virtualization rivals such as VMware and Citrix as one-trick server ponies. Oracle also aimed to do something similar with its virtualization strategy. Among the key moving parts of Red Hat's cloud plans:
The moves make a lot of sense and position Red Hat well. After all, lock-in concerns are a big issue for technology executives investigating cloud computing. Given that Red Hat has many of the pieces for cloud computing the strategy positions the company as more of a Switzerland as other vendors pitch their IT wares.
In other words, Red Hat's real value will be as the point guard to enable portable applications across cloud providers and services. These slides illustrate how Red Hat is positioning its cloud wares.