Red Hat focused on enabling at its Summit event both last year and this year, and it will take several years to get it right, Bozman said. Red Hat won't have the market to itself, but the company's focus on Linux is an advantage, Bozman said.

"Linux runs on every architecture," she said. "It runs on ARM, it runs on RISC, it runs on Itanium, it runs on mainframes. For developers, particularly in cloud, this is going to be important, that Linux runs on everything."

One goal is to let developers write applications in their programming language of choice without necessarily worrying about what infrastructure is underneath. But one vendor alone isn't going to provide all the interoperability needed, Bozman said. Openness has to exist at multiple layers, including operating systems, middleware and APIs.

Enterprise customers "have Linux, they have Windows, they have mainframes, they have Unix servers," she said. "The question is, how can they bring this together with cloud computing and break down the silos?"

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