ComputerWorld just published an interview with the Executive Vice President of Product and Technologies at Red Hat, Paul Cormier, where some interesting details about the company strategy emerge.
First of all Red Hat predicts that within 2 years 90% of the existing servers will run a virtualization platform.
Second, the company sees virtualization as the first step towards a cloud computing world, following VMware which started to spread the idea earlier this year (virtualization.info wrote about this at the beginning of 2006).
Third and most important, Red Hat sees the VDI as the next big thing.
Why this point is specially interesting? Red Hat is only the last of a long series of vendors that demonstrated interest for hosted desktops. But compared to the others the Red Hat vision deserves a little more attention because this is the only company that so far is dropping Xen in favor of KVM.
While open source, KVM is maintained and supported by Qumranet, a US startup (see the virtualization.info coverage here) that offers a commercial VDI solution.
Now let’s consider the equation:
- KVM is now embedded into the Linux kernel
- Red Hat will offer KVM as the virtualization platform of choice
- Red Hat sees VDI as the next big thing
- Qumranet offers the only VDI solution based on KVM
- Qumranet maintains KVM
The question is: how important will become Qumranet for Red Hat in the near future?