Planning is dead for the enterprise, according to Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc. During today’s keynote at Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, Whitehurst emphasized that in the current fast-paced, real-time business world, an organization’s best plans become outdated before they get implemented. The solution, of course, is open-source technology, he said.

To discuss open-source tech and industry influencers, Stu Miniman (@stu) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, analyzed day two of the Summit. (* Disclosure below.) In addition to discussing evolving open-source technologies, they also discussed the Ansible acquisition towards Red Hat’s automation and machine learning efforts.

Changing technologies bring risks and rewards

As any sort of technological planning appears to be falling apart at the seams, the game changers in technology become increasingly difficult to predict, according to Miniman. However, “It’s easier to bet on the waves as opposed to some of the particular tools out there,” he said.

Predicating technologies is a process, figuring out which ones are interesting and learning to separate the hype from reality, Miniman explained. Additionally, there’s a time frame in which many technologies need to mature. For example, not many people who logged into their AOL accounts in the 1990s could have predicted the all-compassing, mobile-based world of internet applications in which most of us live today.

Knight and Miniman observed that the acquisition of information technology automation and DevOps company Ansible 18 months ago seems to be going well. “The two companies are blending, setting up for success,” Knight said.

Red Hat is figuring out how to fold Ansible into the existing organization, making sure its encompassing cloud forms and insights, building in more automation and fitting in with what Red Hat is doing.

“[It] seems to be a great acquisition for them, and [it’s] moving them forward into a lot of spaces,” Miniman concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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