A story of motivation-The infancy, childhood, teenage, and adulthood of Red Hat.

Linux is preferred when it comes to the most secured operating system in the market compared to Windows, Mac, and Chromebook. However, in the year 1994, Linux began with just selling its CD’s for $39.95, and since then the growth this platform has seen is tremendous. In the year 2016, Red Hat became the first 2 billion dollar company. And now in 2019, Red Hat is now into Cloud, IaaS, Dockers and Kubernetes. In this article, we will see how Red Hat was established and improvised itself to become a major cloud player and also driving other flavours in Linux distributions. 

Birth and infacy of Red Hat

It all began when a hacker named Marc Ewing, started crafting this new distribution of Linux on CDs from his Raleigh, N.C., home. The distribution was named after a Red Hat that Marc’s grandfather offered him from the Cornell University lacrosse cap. Marc was wearing this cap when he was a techie at Carnegie Mellon University. 

The first Linux distribution was Manchester Computing Center (MCC) Linux, which was then followed by Slackware, and then Debian. Red Hat came after all these, and is now leading the Linux in terms of both strategy and revenue.

Red Hat would have become something like Debian, a non-commercial platform, however, things changed when Ewing met Bob Young.

Red Hat and its childhood

Bob Young was a young entrepreneur with massive dreams. Ewing and Young got together to sell the Linux version right from Young’s wife sewing closet. They visited every potential lead, demonstrated the platform, everything went well but nothing as compared to Unix. After a substantial amount of analysis on customer buying behavior, Young and Ewing understand the selling point for Red Hat was the option for users to tune it to meet their demands.

 While that set things on track, the inspiration through Lou Gerstner in reinventing IBM actually assisted the Red Hat renovation as well. Though Ewing and Young were not able to pay their house rents, they were inspired by how things turned out with IBM. Customers of IBM were not a fan of their products but still they were depending on IBM. After a while, Gerstner understood that’s because IBM had offices everywhere and people were actually a fan of their services and not the products. Moreover, this point inspired the Red Hat founders, and they updated their business model to offer services instead of products. 

Red Hat believed in working with other tech firms to use the open-source space that everybody was interested in. Instead of fighting for one single room where everyone will fight for the space, Red Hat believed in making the room bigger for more occupancy and that is exactly why Red Hat moved towards the cloud and open-source market. Red Hat believed open-source is the right space considering the amount of freedom, collaboration, contribution, creativity, and agility it brings in and that exactly will drive smart people to achieve bigger things with their organization.

Considering all these points, Red Hat moved into open-source to deliver a better platform for those who relay on it. And this is when Red Hat started working with its rivals and partners on powerful open-source projects like OpenStack, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, Dockers, Kubernetes, Containers and Container management. 

Becoming a teen to explore the opportunities

When Young visited the Goddard Space Flight Centre, and Don Becker showed him his project Beowulf, a Linux supercomputer that’s when Young understood Red Hat is not just going to be at consumer space but its more of a enterprise offering in future. And now, Linux is ruling the supercomputers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has became the current cash cow among the Linux distributions.

Soon, things changed and Red Hat moved completely to the enterprise market by shutting operations for the distribution and focusing completely on the RHEL offering. A few criticism popped up, and said Red Hat is betraying Linux and wants to become like Microsoft. There were internal conflicts, few engineers left the firm while few stayed, in the end Red Hat is actually becoming the pioneer among the Linux flavors and is driving the overall technology and vision of Linux. Red Hat proved the critics wrong and stayed faithful for Linux. Red Hat do not consider the latest flavors like SUSE, TurboLinux or Paradox to be its competitors, all it sees is Microsoft. However, even Red Hat believes Windows leads the B2C market, while Linux for B2B market.

Linux offering was divided among three, 

• Fedora- Cutting edge Linux desktop.
• CentOS- Enterprise level Linux without Red Hat’s support.
• RHEl- Enterprise Linux with full support from Red Hat.

The adulthood and wiseness

Red Hat become wise when it bought the JBoss, a leading java-based middle ware company, to make server-based corporate software. Then Red Hat started to deliver something different from the usual Linux distribution which is an enterprise grade software stack. Understanding the future space of the cloud market, Red Hat after a lot of struggles and upgrades moved to the cloud space after evolving itself from being a VM for VMware VSphere, Microsoft Hype-V, OpenStack and Amazon EC2. In the year 2008, RHEL was on EC2 and became the own cloud platform. 

But that didn’t go well, so Red Hat finally moved to partner with OpenStack in 2012, to develop the Red Hat Open Stack Platform (RHOP). 

So what was wise from Red Hat, rather being in the crowded IaaS market, Red Hat moved to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market with OpenShift. Since then there have been lots of revisions to fit in the development of Dockers and Kubernetes. Above all now Red Hat is everywhere, RHEL can be now found in all cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more. 

Red Hat gets along with IBM

In October 2018, IBM bought Red Hat for $190 per share in cash. The complete value is around $34 billion. With a little flashback, imagine the state where Red Hat was inspired by IBM and now IBM has to buy Red Hat to keep itself surviving. Though IBM bought Red Hat, the latter will continue to stay independent, by keeping its facilities, brands, and unique leadership style. This is more of a partnership than acquisition, with Red Hat’s unique open source offering IBM will deliver a hybrid cloud based service equipped with solid Kubernetes and Docker foundations. 

Red Hat- The motivator

Started from sewing closet to being the Fortune 50, Red Hat has come a long way, thanks to the founder Ewing and Young. Moving from its comfort zone to a subscription model was the turning point in Red Hat’s story which made it a billion dollar company. Slowly moving to clouds and getting along with IBM was a wonderful corporate strategy. 

Cloud market is massive, with players from more bigger than Red Hat but given the hurdles it has come through am sure Red Hat can sustain or even beat over its competitors.