Brian Stevens, formerly Red Hat’s vice president of operating system, storage and clustering development, has been named the Linux company’s CTO and is leading its newly formed Emerging Technologies Group. He spoke recently with Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears about where Red Hat is heading. What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion.

The CTO spot had been vacant for several years. Why fill it now?

We were missing the ability to create a separate organization that could pick the path for future technologies. We were very much driven around product line. Now, with the CTO post, we’ve built an emerging-technologies team, and that team’s charter is to set a vision that’s not just a year ahead, which is typical of the product-line group, but three to five years ahead.

So looking three to five years ahead, where is the focus?

Operational scalability and performance. Instead of coming in and looking at what products Red Hat can deliver to an IT shop, what we’re looking at now is what should the overall open source architecture be. It’s a much broader view than just which products we can make money on. In terms of building an operational architecture, things like Netscape Directory are part of it, but now it’s broadened into things like virtualization, Stateless Linux and capabilities that we just didn’t have before.

Server virtualization is becoming increasingly important. What’s Red Hat’s strategy here?

We expect to deliver virtualization capability coincident with our next major release of Linux, which is planned for the later half of next year. We’re looking at how a virtualized environment changes the rest of the IT architecture in terms of what new management capabilities you need, how security changes, how you build a highly available infrastructure, how all the other aspects such as provisioning and licensing change. We figure out whom we need to partner with, where M&A is needed, what we need to build.

So where do you see Red Hat building, and where do you see it partnering?

We look at potential acquisition every time we’re going to build something. We partner in areas that we feel are farther up in the application space. How you plug the legacy management infrastructure into a virtualized environment, that’s an area where we’ve partnered. We feel, for example, that we have to invest in a new management platform for a virtualized environment, but that will become a platform that the Tivolis and others will sit on.