As the saying goes ... a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... Red Hat was created around Linux and did a great job of working with communities and customers to provide the best enterprise-grade Linux platform around and to this day. However, over the years Red Hat's aspirations and reach have grown to include virtualisation, storage, cloud, middleware and mobile, to name but five new pieces. Whilst the operating system is critical for running applications or services and Linux has all the hooks you'd need to build a huge range of them, they're mostly too low level for many developers. Hence the need for these advanced capabilities so you don't have to do that - someone else has done that hard work for you. Additionally, at least where enterprise software is concerned, those companies and groups will have ironed out many of the bugs and security flaws. Following on from this logic, whilst we've implemented a number of critical technologies "in house", Red Hat has also acquired them - why build when we can buy? JBoss, FeedHenry, eNovance, Makara, Inktank ... We've done a pretty good job of bringing in key software components and adding them to our evolving stack.

I can't think of another pure open source company that has such a deep and broad stack as Red Hat. And this is important for the evolving world we live in today. Whether it's running critical back-end services on RHEL, Java and Java EE with EAP, integration via Fuse, both on or off OpenShift, or even addressing Internet of Things with something like MQTT (A-MQ) and Vert.x, we've got so many of the software tools that a huge range of developers need these days. And these aren't disparate capabilities that don't know about each other - we're continually working hard to make everything we do work well together. In essence, the Red Hat Platform is all of our deep, broad stack integrated and operating together. Of course pieces of this Platform can be used independently of each other, but that's just another compelling reason for developers to consider using it - you're not locked into having to use all or nothing.