My long-time friend, CloudAve author and co-editor Krishnan could not have picked a worse week to announce his turning RED: his news quickly got overshadowed by a deluge of even Bigger and REDder news from REDwood Shores: Oracle with Microsoft, Oracle with Salesforce.com, Oracle with NestSuite .. whose next? 
Anyway, the signs of him turning slowly red were obvious – hey he even got his Google Glass in matching color. What about the Red Shoes he is talking about? Well here they are, in full glory. (If you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you he first tried orange, but had to realize that color was already taken).
Knowing his obsession with RED, I tried to derail him one last time, sending him
this very practical RED Hat – but no dice.
He had to have The Real Thing. And that’s how he landed with Red Hat. Now, what’s next? As for CloudAve, he writes:
I will still continue to write on CloudAve on industry topics. It is going to continue till Zoli Erdos, publisher of CloudAve, kicks me out.
And I’d be stupid to kick him out. I’ve been working with Krish ever since CloudAve’s inception and it gave me immense pleasure to watch him grow from relatively unknown blogger to a well respected analyst, an authority in Cloud Computing and Open Source. He has been part of the fabric of CloudAve, in fact as I’ve had less and less time to write, many of I readers associated his name with CloudAve – and I am perfectly fine with that.
What’s less known is how much he helped me behind the scenes – we get a lot of submissions, many with hidden agendas and I often sought his advice and could always rely on his judgment in the borderline cases. Throughout these years I’ve been impressed by Krish’s high ethical standards, unquestionable integrity. Is he unbiased? No. He is also very opinionated. But also fiercely independent. I’m absolutely not worried about him pushing an agenda now that he’ll become a corporate employee. Of course he will represent Red Hat. But not here. And I absolutely trust his judgment.
Let me also point to a few examples of “corporate types” writing independently here @ CloudAve: Chirag Mehta has long been in senior positions at SAP, John Taschek at Salesforce.com – they are both independent thinkers, not once did they write about their employers here. Mark Suster is a well-known VC, former 3-time entrepreneur, Jason Lemkin also has a few succesfull startup exits behind him: they both cite their own businesses quite a lot, but only as examples used in their phenomenal series, which should be a must for any startup entrepreneurs.
I trust @Krishnan will do the same – so no, my friend, I am not kicking you out. You still have the Carte Blanche here.
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