Jim Whitehurst Keynote - Red Hat Summit 2015 - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2015-06-24

Red Hat’s Whitehurst: Innovate and be agile or fail | #RHSummit

“You have to have a mindset where you are prepared to seek, control and accept failure. … It is a different culture. It requires building processes that were built with agility and innovation in mind, not necessarily purely for efficiency. … It is open, modular technology that allows for rapid change.”

Change your cultural mindset to compete in the new information-driven marketplace or risk failure is the message given by Red Hat, Inc. President and CEO Jim Whitehurst at his keynote address to the Red Hat Summit 2015.

“Vertical value change is disrupting companies at a pace that is almost unimaginable,” said Whitehurst, who sees that company value is no longer based on physical assets, but on information, analytics and knowledge resources.

Companies reinvent themselves to compete in the Information Age

Using the auto industry as an example of a business that is reinventing itself to compete in the Information Age, Whitehurst described how automobiles defined the industrial age through the creation of mass marketing and affordable transportation for the middle class. However, vehicles are now technology products that work on tens of millions of lines of code and require a very different business model and workforce. Whitehurst quoted Ford CEO Mark Fields: “The car is becoming the ultimate technology product, but more importantly, we are becoming more of an information company.”

Continuing with a company that employs technology to continually redefine and exceed its customers’ expectations, Whitehurst explained how coffeshop giant Starbucks Corp. is collaborating with Apple on near-beacon technology that can track when a customer is approaching a Starbucks location. Combining this information with data on individual customer preferences stored online by Starbucks’ Clover brewing machine could allow the store to anticipate and prepare the customer’s order by the time they arrive at the counter.

Experimentation and failure are the essence of innovation in the 21st century

Whitehurst gave three criteria that he believes are critical for any company to successfully navigate the change from an industrial to an information-based culture:

1) Decentralize. The best ideas come from those who are required to innovate to solve a problem. Companies must learn to innovate in a decentralized way.

2) Be Open and Collaborate. Innovation happens in fast-pace and modular way when a business is open and collaborative. Failure must become accepted as part of the innovation cycle.

3) Co-create. User-driven innovation is key for the new business model. As Whitehouse said: “The reason open source has gone from being commoditizing technology to leading innovation is because leading companies are now driving their own roadmaps in open source.”

Watch Jim Whitehurst’s entire keynote address below, and view SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s archived coverage of the Red Hat Summit 2015, including interviews with many participants and key speakers at Red Hat Summit 2015.

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