Red Hat finds itself in a safe spot in a number of ways. Be it virtualisation or cloud, Red Hat believes that it is way above its competitors like VMWare. Infact, the company is now eyeing to snatch Microsoft's marketshare. EFYTimes spoke exclusively to Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president products and technologies, Red Hat Inc about the upcoming products of the company and his ideas on open source. Excerpts: 
EFYTimes: What kind of features can we see in the future releases of Red Hat?
Paul: We are working on RHEL 7 right now. We would want to focus on more connectivity in the Windows world with RHEL 7. There are two operating systems in the data centre right now- RHEL and Windows. What we can ask for is readily more connectivity with active directory. What you will see is more interaction with the Windows world as we take market share from Windows. What we will do now is take some market share from Windows. In the past, people were migrating from UNIX to Linux and some of those going for new projects were opting for Linux instead of Windows. But now we are actually taking market share from them. Another thing that you will see is more features more high performing, more manageable guest operating system in a virtualised environment. You will see tighter integration and more security features and things like that around the guest to make it more secure guest operating system, a better performing guest operating system, a more manageable guest operating system, etc. You will also see RHEL as a part of other platform-as-a-service products such as OpenShift, which is a platform-as-a-service offering. OpenShift is where people move to cloud computing and make almost an appliance of their applications. So you see RHEL used in a lot more situations like that with other tools like OpenShift. After that, if the customer runs his application either in virtualised environment or cloud, they get a common operating system because they are using RHEL. So those are some of the things that we are working on. The beauty of RHEL in the future really is the foundation of cloud computing as the customers build private cloud and want to move to public cloud in a hybrid situation, RHEL will be the foundation to do that.
EFYTimes: Since you just mentioned Microsoft's marketshare, how do you see Microsoft's open source subsidiary?
Paul: From what I know of the Microsoft's open source subsidiary, I don't think it has anything to do with marketshare. What I know is that they are enabling a wholly owned subsidiary to focus on connectivity with open source projects. Frankly, I think that is a good thing. I think Microsoft is now acknowledging that open source is here and here to stay. They have said they will focus on interoperability between open source and their projects. That's a really good thing because what our customers are also asking is more connectivity with Microsoft. So, I think that is a very good initiative.
EFYTimes: How do you see the competition for yourself?
Paul: If you talk about the pure virtualisation environment, I think we are in a very good spot. In terms of cloud we have all the pieces. It takes multiple pieces to build a cloud. Clouds have been built from open source technologies. People build clouds out of virtualisation layer, clouds out of operating systems, clouds our of middleware, clouds out of management components and manage all of that. We have all those pieces. We have established products in all those pieces and have applications running on them. So, I think we are in a very good shape to build clouds on top of our products. VMWare has Hypervisor. Applications don't run on hypervisor. They run on operating systems and app service and they don't have either of those. So as we move to cloud environment, I think VMWare has some very serious holes in their product portfolio to enable their customers to go to the cloud environment.
EFYTimes: What does Red Hat do to increase the participation of the community in India?
Paul: You cannot look at it as the American open source community or the Indian open source community, because that's what makes open source what it is. You get view points from all over the world. It's not about the Indian viewpoint or the American viewpoint, it's about the best technical solution. The best technical solution comes out of the guy sitting in California or a guy sitting in Pune. So that is the beauty of open source. The development models that Microsoft and VMWare use is you get one guy sitting in one company and they get to decide by themselves what goes in and what doesn't go in, what parts to fix and what parts not to fix. With this community, the whole world gets to see it and anyone across the world with the best idea can get it done. That's why open source is so strong and that's why the technology here advances so much faster than a traditional model. So, I wouldn't think there is an Indian, American or any other open source community. It is the technology that people are interested in.
Apart from this, you need to look at the profile of Red Hat in two parts. One part is how we build and develop software and the second part is how we sell and do our business. The development piece is a continuous engine and that's the open source part of what Red Hat does. For that, we need a community. We need to have a two-way dialogue. What we believe in is the community between 14 years and 30 years is really the one that is building the next generation of software and we have to involve them and we have to get close to them.
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