With Deltacloud, Red Hat is hoping to return the speed and power of commoditized technology to CIOs and end users.

FORBES: RedHat CEO Whitehurst: Don't Be Tricked into Cloud-based Lock-in

With Deltacloud, its open-source offering, Red Hat has set out to standardize the cloud, which has already begun to splinter into vertical stacks.

FORBES: RedHat CEO Whitehurst: Don't Be Tricked into Cloud-based Lock-in

By using an agnostic approach to the cloud, such as Deltacloud, the benefits will accrue to the enterprise and not to the cloud providers.

FORBES: RedHat CEO Whitehurst: Don't Be Tricked into Cloud-based Lock-in

If Deltacloud succeeds, an application should be able to be created that can run on a VM in a data center, on a private cloud infrastructure, or on the public cloud without modification.

FORBES: RedHat CEO Whitehurst: Don't Be Tricked into Cloud-based Lock-in

The object of Deltacloud is to open up competition and choice in the cloud market, just as Red Hat Linux did in the hardware market, eliminating the switching cost of investing in a new stack of proprietary offerings and allowing cloud users to invest the savings into conducting application development that truly differentiates them.

FORBES: RedHat CEO Whitehurst: Don't Be Tricked into Cloud-based Lock-in