So we think server consolidation is a use case but there are many other use cases out there that we've just started to scratch the surface on. And as I said not to mention the cloud computing that you hear so much about - that is probably the biggest use case for virtualization.

Rather than following Microsoft and others in building its own infrastructure to host its software, Red Hat is using Amazons EC2. Can you tell me about the company's approach to cloud computing?

Our position, or what cloud computing means to us, is you will see at least three kinds of networks: private networks as an enterprise may have today where they control all the resources on the network; semi-private networks where you may have a data center where resources are shared with a trusted partner or a series of trusted partners; and a public network such as Amazon EC2. We think that customers will want to run any combination or permutation of those three, and they will want to be able to manage it as they have all the resources in front of them - the ability to spin up, spin down, provision, monitor etc - all those resources as they are in front of them even if they are in the public network. So that's how we think its going to happen, we think there will be lots of public networks out there.

The path that Microsoft looks like they are going down, I can't tell for sure, but the path it looks like they are going down is similar to what they do with their operating systems and applications. You could play in that game but you'll be locked into their cost, their pricing and their terms. Whereas what we're doing is we want to enable enterprises as well as other people that are running these public networks, we want to be able to enable them with the software to be able to work within that structure. That's where open interfaces and open source comes in as I think there will be many, many types of these networks. You shouldn't care where you're getting the service from, you should just care that you can work within that service and you can't do that in a proprietary closed way. It has to be open source.

I think that's also one of the reasons why you're seeing so much in infrastructure software being done from an open source perspective. Our goal is not to see ourselves as just a Linux vendor - that's certainly important and where we cut our teeth - but we see ourselves as pushing open source into viable commercial solutions across the entire infrastructure.