I recently had a chance to sit down over a Thai food lunch with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Whitehurst, who took over Red Hat after leaving Delta
Airlines in 2007, had a lot to say about the current situation of open
source computing, and ReadWrite will be following up on many of those
threads in the coming weeks and months. But I didn't want to wait to
share some of Whitehurst's most interesting observations:
1. How Does Open Source = Kaizen Manufacturing?
Whitehurst compared open source software development to the Kaizen "continuous-improvement" manufacturing system
made famous by Toyota. According to Whitehurst, open source is the
digital equivalent of breaking up the manufacturing process into key
individual components and using just-in-time inventory to make sure you
have the right re-usable objects at hand when you need them.
2. What's Up With Red Hat & OpenStack?
Red Hat has promised to have support for OpenStack ready
in the next year, Whitehurst reminded me, and remains on track to
deliver. "But until then, I would be hesitant to run production apps on
OpenStack… We're not seeing much more than experimentation with it for
now."
3. Who Makes Key Enterprise Architecture Decisions?
Surprisingly, Whitehurst claimed that neither Red Hat nor enterprise CEOs typically make key IT architecture decisions.
For Red Hat, the company usually has little input on
whether a customer will go with Linux. "Generally that's an architecture
decision that's already made when Red Hat gets involved," Whitehurst
explained. We've been a layer player… We haven't had a seat a the table
for the architecture discussion."
Even more interesting, an enterprise's technology partners
make the vast majority of the technology decisions, Whitehurst said,
not the end customers. That's true at even the largest companies.
4. When Do CIOs Get Involved?
According to Whitehurst, only at those few companies that
actually use technology for competitive advantage - like an investment
bank - do the CIOs get involved in the technology decision. At Delta
Airlines, Whitehurst's previous employer, for example, the decision to
use Linux and the JBoss application server was made way down the IT org
chart.
5. What Factors Go Into IT Technology Decisions?
"80% of technology decisions are not made on the merits of
the technology," Whitehurst claimed. It's more, do we have the people
to run it and support it? Is there an app infrastructure for it? What
skill do our in-house developers have or need? And, crucially, what's
the risk?
6. How Do Smaller Companies Make Their Technology Decisions?
For small businesses, they typically choose by the ability
to find people to support the technology, Whitehurst said, because they
can't afford to devote scarce resources to training. That's a big
advantage for Microsoft, which has already trained legions of MCSE's around the world.
7. What's The Real Difference Between Enterprise And Consumer Technology?
"Enterprise IT sees the glass half empty," Whitehurst
said. "Consumer IT sees the glass half full." Technologists in the
consumer space have "bravado," he added. "It's okay for them to fail;
they just try again. We need some more of that in the enterprise." That
won't necessarily be easy, though, because the enterprise world faces
such different challenges. Enterprise problems are so mundane, it's like
trying to take spaghetti and unravel it… but the guy who wrote the
original code "literally died" and they have to figure out what to do,
Whitehurst explained. "That's their lives."
Image courtesy of Red Hat.
http://readwrite.com/2012/11/27/7-open-source-questions-with-red-hat-ceo-jim-whitehurst
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