Issac Roth, John Poelstra, and Scott Crenshaw discuss how OpenShift managed to take Red Hat from acute anxiety to developer groundswell and dominance in the coming cloud.

Topics discussed:

• The business environment that allowed for Red Hat to consider acquiring OpenShift. (“Red Had suffered from acute anxiety about being disintermediated and losing its business model.”)
• All the things had to go right for OpenShift to become a success. (“The path looks linear in retrospect, but it never is in practice.”) 
• Launching containerized apps. (“No one wanted to use the word ‘containers.’”)
• Pushing innovation and experimentation inside a bigger company.
• Building a go-to-market machine.
• Embracing a competitor (Docker).
• Creating a developer groundswell through inclusion.
•  The vegetable oil-spewing Franken-car.

Issac Roth and John Poelstra are joined by Mike McGrath to discuss the early days of OpenShift and how it convinced Red Hat to take a chance to solve its ‘coolness crisis.’ 

Topics discussed:

• The technical environment that allowed for Red Hat to consider acquiring OpenShift.
• Heroku and first-mover advantage.
• OpenShift’s scatter-shot approach to launching products and the “summit curse.”
• The early days of product evangelism and community building.
• Real marketing for tech products.
• RedHat’s coolness crisis.
• How Red Hat supported the growth of OpenShift.