Jim Whitehurst, the former chief operating officer of Delta Airlines and new chief executive at Red Hat, wasted no time in conveying his beliefs on the future of the company. "The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst declared. In an interview with CNET News.com, he pointed out that many of the top tech companies continue to profit handsomely, not necessarily due to the quality of their offerings, but rather because of the high switching costs that embracing alternate solutions entails. The result is that IT budgets continue to rise as proprietary solutions vendors takes advantage of the situation to increase support fees. Not so for a support-based open-source paradigm, where a customer can simply opt to stop paying.

Whitehurst went on to elaborate about the ongoing efforts at Red Hat to position the company to embrace cloud computing in terms of certification and management tools.

For more on Red Hat:
- check out this CNET News.com article [1]