Eavesdroppers at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco this week would have heard “open,” “multicloud,” and “hybrid infrastructure” dominating the excited babble of conversation. But the new buzz is old hat for Red Hat Inc., a veteran of open-source hybrid cloud computing.

“Any products, anything that would release to the market, the first filter that we run through is: Will it help our customers with their open hybrid cloud journey?” said Ranga Rangachari (pictured), vice president and general manager of storage and hyperconverged infrastructure at Red Hat.

Rangachari spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event. They discussed adoption of open hybrid cloud and how working as an ecosystem is critical for success in solving storage and infrastructure problems (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Partnership and cooperation are mission critical

While Google is staking new ground in multicloud computing at this week’s event, Red Hat’s product strategy has been built around facilitating the hybrid cloud for the better part of the last decade, as the company has been “unwavering” in its focus on open hybrid cloud both in business and technology strategy, according to Rangachari. This focus is paying off.

“Practically every customer that we talk to wants to embark on an open hybrid cloud story,” Rangachari said.

The most common scenario requested by customers is migrating data between clouds, or from on-prem to a public cloud while adhering to specific policies. “The Holy Grail is how do you facilitate data portability and application portability across these hybrid clouds … but what users don’t want to do is stitch them together, right? They want a simple, easy way,” Rangachari stated.

Completing the quest for open hybrid cloud is no solo journey. “For us to be successful, for our customers to be successful, we need an ecosystem of partners. And the cloud providers are absolutely a critical ingredient and a critical component of the overall strategy,” Rangachari said.

Red Hat and Google are founding members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and long-term partners in advancing cloud technology. Rangachari sees the two companies continuing to cooperate into the future. “I think it’s very important that the community together solves the problem, not just one vendor,” he said.

Welcoming the announcement of Anthos, Google Cloud’s new open platform with hybrid functionality, Ragnachari said: “It validates to a certain extent what Red Hat has been talking about for the last five to seven years; which is you need a unified way to deploy, manage, provision your infrastructure not just on public clouds, but a seamless way to connect to on premise. I think Anthos is a validation of how we’ve been thinking about the world. So we think it’s great.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE