Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is perhaps best known as the leading enterprise Linux vendor. While Linux is the core of Red Hat’s business, their JBoss middleware business is also a critical component of Red Hat’s overall platform play. As Red Hat gears up for its next era of growth, the most often asked question is: Where does Red Hat needs to go next? One potential area of expansion for Red Hat could be the database market.
“If you think about what makes up a platform, what you’re seeing is that more and more components of functionality are getting sucked in,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told InternetNews.com. “We basically have our data services layer. which tries to do some degree of data federation. Will there be more stuff around that? Certainly there will be.”
Whitehurst added that as there is an explosion of data there are increasing storage needs that Red Hat might get pulled into.
“I’m not necessarily a big fan of us being in the database business, but we have GFS and some other things already,” Whitehurst said.