“We have had over 60 quarters of consecutive growth”

Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat explains to Voice& Data about his commercial business model in the open source ecosystem

Voice & Data: How would you describe Red Hat’s commercial model in the open source ecosystem? How would you differentiate that from other competing vendors operating in the open source?

Chris Wright: Our technology evolves around Open source product /projects upstream.We productize, bring those to markets, so paying attention to the open source communities and the broad trends in the industry is a key part of my role in the company. The main aim of Red Hat is bringing together the open source development communities of ourselves as engineers, as part of those communities, our customers providing requirements that we help lead into and develop solutions to those requirements in the communities as well as our partners.

So, we kind of play a role across multiple different ecosystems ultimately trying to bring technology, innovation and open source communities in a consumable way to our enterprise customers. It’s not always easy for a customer to go directly to an open source project and expect it to power their enterprise with open source. We play a fundamental role in that whole ecosystem and process.

I like to think of ourselves as sort of a buffer between the enterprise trying to consume open source-based technology and sort of a free form, fast moving pace of innovation in the open source projects themselves. We provide a clear distinction between a project and a product. Product has a life cycle, maintenance, security updates. We may even do a feature inclusion that looks like a backward the functionality, from a newer portion of the project to