The Open Source CIO

Mike Kelly, Peter Levine, and Das Rush

Posted February 28, 2020

In 2014, in “Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat,” Peter Levine argued that Red Hat’s open source business model of commercializing support and services was highly difficult to replicate. Instead, he predicted the future of open source companies would be open source-as-a-service. And today SaaS has emerged as the dominant business model.

In this podcast, recorded as a hallway-style conversation as part of the a16z Innovation Summit last year, Peter chats with Red Hat CIO, Mike Kelly, about what it means to be an open source CIO today – and how even Red Hat is evolving in the open SaaS era. They cover everything from why open hybrid has become the dominant enterprise architecture to how CIOs should think about adopting new technologies to what, beyond the spreadsheets, it takes for an M&A to be successful.

Going from open source bits, the source code, to creating a reliable, manageable service, there's a lot of work in that. - Peter Levine

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