Red Hat Summit 2013: Company Pushes 'Open Innovation' As Future Of IT

Red Hat Inc.'s lead for its technology and product organizations, Paul Cormier, opened Day 2 of the ninth annual Red Hat Summit, held here on Wednesday, by explaining how some of the company's pivotal undertakings over the past 11 years will provide the springboard to where Red Hat is headed tomorrow.

The executive vice president and president of products and technologies at Red Hat credited open source with enabling the rapid innovation that's required to solve today's real-world business problems almost immediately.

"Linux came along and changed everything. It moved us from a pure commodity play to the innovative driver of the transformation that's happening today," Cormier said.

Not only that, Red Hat's long-term vision of driving open source software into the mainstream IT infrastructure -- and having it adopted as the primary development process -- is coming to fruition, he said.