INTERVIEW: Automating “as much as possible” can help telecoms operators and other enterprises move at a pace akin to the world’s technology giants, according to Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of open source solutions provider Red Hat (pictured).

Whitehurst told Mobile World Live one of the biggest issues facing the telecoms industry and other enterprises was an inability to make their operations move faster, and implementing automation processes was essential to achieving business transformation.

“It’s about creating a layered architecture, it’s thinking about business process systems and the culture around how to make sure people are doing things that people need to do and you can automate everything else around and make it as simple as possible,” he said.

“It’s a technology strategy, but its also a business strategy as enterprises deal with digital transformation and disruption.”

In an interview at Mobile World Congress, Whitehurst also spoke about the work Red Hat is doing in helping companies integrate applications within their operations.

“If you have an application portfolio and you have myriad different opportunities for how you want to deploy those applications, so we try to be the glue in the middle, or the abstraction layer in the middle,” he said.

Whitehurst also spoke about the benefits of enterprises transitioning to the cloud and the rationale behind Red Hat’s $250 million acquisition of CoreOS. Click here to watch.