paul cormier

BOSTON: A couple themes emerged from this week’s Red Hat Summit.

1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player.

It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.

The VAR Guy: "During Red Hat Summit in Chicago, CEO Jim Whitehurst and Executive VP Paul Cormier warned attendees not to get locked into virtualization and cloud initiatives involving Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware."

Novell Inc.’s recent coup of achieving bidirectional virtualization with Microsoft’s Hyper-V — SUSE Linux Enterprise can run as a guest on Hyper-V and Hyper-V on SUSE — is a huge step forward for interoperability.