With Red Hat really being the main driver of commercial open source operating systems we think we're in a great position to help to make virtualization ubiquitous across all hardware platforms. If you look at it now virtualization is run on somewhere between six to eight percent of servers, and we think in the next two years that will be 90 percent of servers.

We think that Linux in the commercial space, and RHEL specifically, opened up and really showed the viability and advantages of having open source in the enterprise. Where virtualization is the bottom half of the OS, I think it would be a step backwards for the world to go to a proprietary virtualization layer because we would be back to one or two companies dictating when vendors can ship their hardware, what things they can support, and how they perform etc. We think it's a step backwards to go at that level with proprietary software and I think people are starting to see that and are not wanting to lose the advantages they've gained with open source operating systems.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said that the value in virtualization from Red Hat's perspective is less around server consolidation and more about what new functionality or architectures virtualization can enable. Could you elaborate on this a little more?

Server consolidation is one case use for virtualization, and unfortunately when virtualization came out everybody sort of pounded on the server consolidation thing. Server consolidation certainly is a use case, but there are other very important use cases: with the ability to split the hardware layer from the layer that interacts with the ISVs you now can run multiple versions of a particular operating system on one set of hardware. So if you're not ready to move an application from one version to the other you can run it right next to the new version of the operating system, and not have to spread out your applications and buy new boxes while you migrate those applications. That is an important use case. We also think high availability in fail-over is a very important application.

One of the next big things coming is the virtual desktop; the ability to have a very, very inexpensive Linux thin client on the desktop with the ability to serve a Windows OS or a Linux OS from a remote server back in the data center to desktops scattered around the enterprise. We think that's a huge use case that solves a lot of management and scalability problems.