Red Hat's open source success story built on killing complexity in IT
Summary
After all, though Redmonks Stephen OGrady correctly reports that "Red Hat remains the sole example of a pure play open source organization matching the revenue generated by even modest-sized proprietary alternatives," its also true that Red Hats formula--making complex open-source software safe and secure for mainstream enterprise adoption--has never been so critically required. Despite some fits and starts, Red Hat later added app servers (JBoss), virtualization (Qumranet), and more--each time finding ways to make money by removing complexity from the enterprise IT stack. Looking forward, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees more of the same, adding private cloud (OpenStack) and containers (Docker) and other open-source infrastructure to its mix. This trend toward open data infrastructure is only going to continue to accelerate, as Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson stated: The problem, however, is complexity. Few enterprises, for example, really want to futz with deciphering ActiveMQ vs. Qpid vs. HornetQ vs. RabbitMQ, or Spark vs. Hadoop vs. Storm vs. [Project Of The Week Here].
