The News: Red Hat unveiled its newest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9) operating system release at Red Hat Summit 2022 this week, giving enterprise users more new features and capabilities that are designed to mesh with the rest of the company’s broad enterprise open source application portfolio. RHEL 9 is the latest enterprise-ready version of the computer operating system in the company’s 29-year Linux lineage. To read the full Press Release on this news, click here.

At Red Hat Summit 2022, the New Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Release Shows How Far RHEL Has Come as a Success-Driven Igniter of Linux and Open Source for Enterprises

Analyst Take: It was abundantly clear at Red Hat Summit 2022 this week that even after all these years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is still the table on which the rest of the company’s smorgasbord of enterprise applications is laid out. RHEL is the platform heart of it all, running business infrastructures, research work, AI, cloud, financial business systems, industrial manufacturing and more for thousands of companies around the world. And RHEL 9’s continuing development connects strategically with Red Hat’s related applications for the cloud, the edge, automation, Kubernetes container management, and a wide range of other segments, with all of them contributing to Red Hat’s vast RHEL-based ecosystem that provides huge flexibility and capabilities for RHEL users.

RHEL 9 is just the latest piece of this established groundwork for Red Hat, but I think it is particularly notable because of its deep history and successes in powering enterprise IT infrastructures for so many customers over almost three decades. Red Hat started offering its original Red Hat Linux distribution on CDs back in 1993 through a shoestring operation, which was followed in 2002 by its first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which was built specifically for enterprise computing.

The latest RHEL 9 release follows that legacy with new comprehensive edge management features, broader image builder capabilities, a smoother DevOps user experience, and automatic container roll-back with Podman, RHEL’s integrated container management technology.

While the new features will undoubtedly be helpful for enterprises seeking to continue to refine and improve their critical business infrastructures, but I also believe the latest RHEL 9 release marked a significant moment at the Red Hat Summit, where the company delivered its rich software legacy into an even higher sphere of importance.

Red Hat Linux originally started out as a stand-alone operating system, with no other thoughts at that time about how it could someday connect to other critical enterprise platforms inside an IT infrastructure.

But over the last few years, and especially at this year’s Red Hat Summit, the company brought it all together in a beautifully-wrapped package due to one of RHEL 9’s biggest design changes – RHEL 9 marks Red Hat’s first production operating system release that is built from its CentOS Stream development path. With this change, Red Hat says it will now have a standardized dynamic platform that will span the entirety of its other platforms and use cases, including hybrid cloud, datacenters, public clouds, and edge deployments.

This is an exciting move, and one which I think clearly illustrates how Red Hat has grown and matured as an enterprise IT powerhouse, with an ecosystem filled with enterprise applications that interconnect with other IT requirements in everything from RHEL to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and Red Hat Ceph Storage, just to name a few.

These expanded capabilities from Red Hat Summit and RHEL continue to transform enterprise computing and allow the company to consistently fill the ever-changing needs of enterprise IT and enterprise software developers.

This will be an exciting enterprise IT infrastructure segment to watch as Red Hat and Linux continue to help fuel innovation and flexibility in the world of open source. For all of this, Red Hat owes a great debt to its original Linux history and releases which set the company on its path and helped it achieve market success.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.