Red Hat is OpenShifting into the cloud

Best known for its Linux distribution, Red Hat’s introduction of OpenShift Enterprise 2 shows that the open-source giant has its eyes on the cloud.

Two years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told me that by 2016, Red Hat’s biggest rival would be VMware. Why VMware instead of Microsoft or Oracle, its traditional enemies? Whitehurst saw Red Hat’s future not in operating systems but in the clouds as a Platform as a service (PaaS) vendor powered by KVM virtualizaton running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Now with the release of OpenShift Enterprise 2, the latest version of its private PaaS offering, we know Whitehurst wasn’t kidding.