Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) executives put on a web-based press conference Tuesday to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its flagship product – Red Hat Enterprise Linux – but much of the attention was on “cloud computing.”

Red Hat is a leader on Wall Street where RHEL equipped servers provide much of the heavy lifting for financial transactions.

But as ZDnet noted in a blog, Red Hat also made clear plans to rule in the space of virtualization and cloud computing where clients can scale up computing resources on demand and maintain multiple operating systems on one server.

“Make no mistake about it, VMware and Microsoft, and any other company trying to reform their proprietary image the open era: Red Hat has the not-so-secret sauce — the stack of open source technology and open source development model — necessary to make it the king of the cloud era,” ZDnet’s bloggers wrote.

“We’re stradding both worlds …. we’re driving the future,” they quoted Red Hat’s longtime engineering chief, Paul Cormier as saying.

Jim Totten, vice president and general manager at Red Hat’s Platform business unit, said the next version of RHEL is due sometime next year.

“While we are not at a place where we are making announcements … our general target is the second half of 2013 to see RHEL 7 enter the marketplace,” Totten said, according to PCWorld.

Red Hat did lay out its “strategic plans” for RHEL:

  • “Continuing to deliver a highly reliable, feature-rich and cost-effective operating system infrastructure;
  • “Forming the basis of open hybrid clouds, delivering a consistent environment allowing applications to migrate easily between on-premise and public cloud environments with a consistent development and management platform, with industry-leading multi-tenacy, resource management, and Quality-of-Service management capabilities; and
  • “Expanding the use of Linux for many types of workloads – legacy and next-generation, inside and outside the enterprise, on-premise and hybrid – to accommodate the explosive workload demands resulting from social, big data, and mobile applications.”

Read the ZDnet blog here.

Read the PCWorld report here.

Read more about Red Hat’s event here.

[RED HAT ARCHIVE: Check out a decade of Red Hat stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire by clicking here.]