Red Hat Hires Microsoft Cloud Exec for OpenStack, Virtualization Push

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Azure cloud veteran Radhesh Balakrishnan has joined Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to drive the open source company’s OpenStack and virtualization strategies. Balakrishnan’s career move comes at a critical time for Red Hat, which is striving to push beyond Linux to compete with Microsoft and VMware (NYSE:VMW) across private and public clouds.

Although Red Hat remains in growth mode, the company’s most recent financial results disappointed Wall Street. Some investors worry that Red Hat is too small to focus on so many priorities — Linux, virtualization, middleware, storage and now cloud computing…

Balakrishnan, now general manager of Red Hat’s virtualization business unit, will help to make the case that the company’s software offerings complement one another. Among his top priorities: Building an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform powered by OpenStack. The effort will also leverage KVM (kernel-based virtualization), an open source alternative to VMware’s vSphere hypervisor. But there again, Red Hat faces plenty of competition. Multiple OpenStack distributions are already surfacing in the market. And big vendors like Dell, HP and IBM are launching public clouds on OpenStack, which remains backed by Rackspace…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/iaas/red-hat-hires-microsoft-cloud-exec-openstack-virtualization-push