Announcements Pour In from Red Hat's Conference

This week, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 conference is going on, and Red Hat is making a number of new announcements. In addition, Red Hat's always highly quotable CEO Jim Whitehurst--a veteran of the airline industry--is out with some notable reflections on the state of open source.

Much has written about Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, which gives developers tools and frameworks for building cutting-edge cloud applications. At this week's conference, Red Hat has delivered some forward-looking glimpses at OpenShift's business model. In particular, Red Hat will offer enterprise-class service for it. One strain of the platform and surrounding services will be called FreeShift and remain free, while a paid offering called MegaShift will include full support services from Red Hat. 

Red Hat has also announced the Red Hat Pathway to Open Source Enablement consulting service aimed at helping customers "formalize enterprise open source adoption, development, and governance strategies." The strategic business consulting service is scheduled to be available in North America beginning in July, and will expand into additional regions. 

Meanwhile, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has delivered some wise words at this week's conference. As ZDNet notes, there are some key decisions coming up regarding open source and its role in IT architecture:

"Open source has gone mainstream … open source is the default choice of the next generation IT architecture...The decisions we make over the next few years [are critical] … if we have a new architecture with an old business model it still does not get us there."

 Only a few days ago, Red Hat's stock slid after the company reported earnings, but it has since picked up momentum again. And, only recently, Red Hat became the very first billion-dollar-a-year company focused on open source.