Will Red Hat concentrate more on Cloud Computing in 2017?

Cloud computing skills, services and platforms are trending across the IT industry and have gained the significant audience for its own. The shrinking stock price of the Red Hat Enterprises in the year of 2016 would have left a pressure on the organization to explore growth opportunities. The Red Hat enterprises came into existence as a billion dollar open source enterprise for its excellent on-premise infrastructure with lots of security and reliability. Now, Red Hat Enterprises's business will be in downslide for the drastic migration of users to cloud infrastructure from on-premise infrastructure. Indeed, as CEO Jim Whitehurst marked on the company's most recent profit earnings, Red Hat Enterprises now has hundreds of OpenStack customers, in addition to thousands of customers for its storage, operating system, and middleware offerings. This portrays customers holding steady on existing infrastructure and upgrading to open source offerings. The actual growth, however, resides within the cloud platform, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) keeps claiming victories as proof to this story. Thus, in order to protect itself from severe downslide, the open source enterprise should manage this existential crisis, Red Hat Enterprises needs to double down on its cloudiest technology: its OpenShift PaaS offering. Though the OpenShift business is growing, it has to grow a heck of a lot faster in order to leave the mark in the market.

Cloud used to be for early adopters No more: Cloud -- increasingly public cloud -- is the default deployment model for new workloads that, as Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman indicates, "[are] simply growing faster" than on-prem/private cloud applications.

Yes, companies still buy on-prem software, and, yes, there are still OpenStack adherents to make them feel better about this choice. OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce argues that some applications benefit from private datacenter-driven flexibility and cost savings, and plenty of enterprises are piling on, as a Red Hat Enterprises-sponsored survey suggests. Beyond survey data, on each earnings call Red Hat Enterprises has touted a growing tally of OpenStack customers.

How successful are the cloud platform?

Amazon keeps defining the advanced and next generation technologies of enterprise computing effectively. Already past $10 billion in annual revenue, AWS keeps growing at a torrid pace. More important, The AWS is already innovating at a rapid pace that no other organization seems to be able to match the rate of growth and reach. Recently, the Amazon Web Services has been witnessed to render the idea of a server obsolete with an aggressive push into Lambda functions and server-less computing.

To conclude this, the OpenShift, not OpenStack, is the vital part of this story. The Platform as a Service being a market call, the offering isn't the be-all and end-all, but it's critical to helping Red Hat Enterprises think beyond systems that can be installed only on premise. Red Hat Enterprises is vulnerable enough to get slowed down and it is a far smarter bet than praying for an OpenStack future that will never come.