Red Hat’s Whitehurst: What Next For Open Source?

Working without marketing dollars

But, in outlining the vendor’s strategy, which will inevitably take it into territory more traditionally occupied by the likes of IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, he added a couple of caveats: “You’ve got to recognise, in comparing us to Microsoft with its x-hundred-billion-dollar market cap, we’re talking about a competitor with a marketing budget in orders of magnitude beyond our total revenue. So we have to invest in targeted way in what we can do. And historically that’s been starting with industries and areas where our performance shows through most clearly.

“So we have a huge share of the financial services industry and most of the world trading platforms, very specifically because our technology’s performance directly leads to faster trades, which leads to more revenue for them. As you start looking at our technology this way, where say, we run SAP faster than any other platform or if you’re running your HR [human resources] platform on us, you need fewer licences that’s a two or three-step message we have to get out there – showing the end user the value of our technology to them,” he said.

Strategic execution may be a major focus, but Whitehurst was also keen to relate this activity back to the actual ‘solutions’ his company is developing. “There are significant efforts underway within JBoss, with the launch of EAP 5.0 [Red Hat Enterprise Application Platform 5.0], and within our core platforms, having also launched RHEL 5.4 [Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4]. We’re also rolling out solution selling training for all of our salesforce, which we’ve never done before, so there’s a whole series of things we’re doing.”

Innovating in hypervisors

Whitehurst was also keen to elaborate further on the significance of RHEL 5.4, and the introduction in the new operating system (OS) version of its kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor. “There are three key sources of benefits for KVM that VMware, Citrix’s Xen and Microsoft with its Hyper-V absolutely cannot match,” he said. “KVM’s core architecture is not a hypervisor, it turns Linux into a hypervisor. That’s important because, being open source, hardware manufacturers can do their own hardware enablement, rather than waiting for the hypervisor vendor to get around to enabling their technology in a specific server or chip, it’s already there; they’ve already certified it, meaning we already have a larger certified base of hardware for our OS than any competitor.

“Secondly, it breaks the unnecessary distinction that says the server has to virtualised or it has to be bare metal,” he continued. “Oracle will not support any of its applications virtualised unless it’s on their flavour of virtualisation. By having KVM built into the OS, you can run your Oracle environment, be it applications, databases or whatever, bare metal on the machine and, at the same time, spool up 10 virtual instances running whatever else you want. So now you can virtualise your whole infrastructure and run Oracle in a supported way – that’s a clear benefit for customers out there.”

He added: “The third reason is a bit more ethereal today, but it won’t be over the next year: by abstracting [KVM-based] VMs, that is, guests, to be a running instance on Linux, those VMs can inherit the myriad of technologies that already be it to run processes on Linux. So, if you want to wrap military grade security and policies around that virtual instance, you can do that today with Red Hat because you re-use [open-sourced] technology written by the NSA. That doesn’t exist today with any other OS than Linux and Red Hat.”