Let’s play a game. Who do you think Red Hat’s biggest enemy will be in a few years? Will it be Microsoft, Linux’s traditional enemy? Could SUSE, the number two business Linux distributor, make a try for the top? Might Ubuntu’s Canonical make its big break into corporate Linux? All good guesses, but Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, is pretty sure that Red Hat’s biggest competitor in 2016 will be VMware.
I know, I know, you’re thinking, “VMware? VMware!? The king of virtualization? A company that doesn’t even have an operating system or a middleware stack?” Why not Oracle? I mean Oracle makes no bones about wanting to take Red Hat on… and bury then.
Whitehurst, knows all that and has good reason for seeing VMware as Red Hat’s real rival in the decade to come. At LinuxCon in Vancouver, British Columbia explained his reasoning to me.