The largest competitor to Red Hat is not Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), but virtualization vendor VMware. And the reason? It has to do with both companies' focus on cloud computing, even if they are going at it from different angles. In an interview at the Red Hat Summit held last week, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst referred to VMware when said "We're the only two companies that have the components to really do cloud."

As one would expect, Whitehurst argues that cloud computing favors open source as opposed to approaches that lock companies into proprietary technologies. Alluding to how an open-source approach is the best solution to build a cloud, Whitehurst summed up the entire argument by saying, "Who in their right mind would roll out a 50,000 server environment locked into one vendor? If you buy ESX and three years later you get a renewal, how much will [VMware] charge you?"

Of course, detractors will argue that Red Hat's role in cloud computing is hardly vital. Ultimately, be it the hypervisor or the operating system, both depend on the presence of a robust, powerful framework for developers to create the applications. On this front, Red Hat launched Red Hat Cloud Foundations, which comes bundled with JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at ZDNet 

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