Red Hat: On bridging between the first wave of cloud and next generation platforms

MWC19 For Red Hat, it may sometimes be easier to list what the company doesn't do rather than what it does. The overall umbrella of 'making open source technologies for the enterprise' can range from containers, to cloud, to 5G. But ultimately, as the company has noted at MWC Barcelona this week, it's all developing into a hybrid universe - and it's a space where their customers and partners feel increasingly comfortable.This is a message of which regular followers of the company - particularly since the acquisition by IBM - will be aware. Take the quotes issued at the time of the original announcement in October. IBM chief executive GInni Rometty described it as 'the next chapter of the cloud...requir[ing] shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimising every part of the business, from supply chains to sales. Lo and behold, a similar message came forth last week, when Rometty keynoted IBM's annual Think conference in San Francisco. "I've often said we're entering chapter two - it's cloud and it's hybrid," she told delegates. "In chapter one, 20% of your work has moved to the cloud, and it has mostly been driven by customer-facing apps, new apps being put in, or maybe some inexpensive compute. But the next 80%... is the core of your business.