Executive message

What's on Paul Smith's mind? Find out in our monthly Red Hat® Government executive message.

2013:  January  |  February

2012:  January  |  February  |  March  | April  |  May  |  June  |  July  |  August  |  September  |  October  |  November  |  December

 

government_paul_smith.jpgFebruary

Today Red Hat announced our big data direction and solutions to satisfy enterprise requirements for highly reliable, scalable, and manageable solutions to effectively run big data analytics workloads.

In addition, Red Hat announced we will contribute our Red Hat Storage Hadoop plug-in to the Apache Hadoop® open community to transform Red Hat Storage into a fully-supported, Hadoop-compatible file system for big data environments.

Plus, Red Hat is building a robust network of ecosystem and enterprise integration partners to deliver comprehensive big data solutions to your organization. This is another example of Red Hat’s strategic commitment to your big data initiatives within public sector and its continuing efforts to provide you with enterprise solutions through community-driven innovation.

Learn more about our big data infrastructure solutions here.

 

January

 The public sector can, at times, be challenging with its unique market and procurement requirements. Red Hat believes it’s important to recognize public sector partners who are performing above and beyond to deliver sustained value despite the obstacles they may face. At the Red Hat Partner Conference 2013 we honored our valued partners with our annual Partner Awards. You can read more about all of the award-winning partners both for public sector and commercial here.

As the IT landscape continues to evolve and create new opportunities for partners, Red Hat is announcing several partner program enhancements and investments designed to support and reward Red Hat partners.

Our partner community helps our customers implement innovative, cost-effective solutions that deliver real value. To find a partner or become a partner go to www.redhat.com/partners

 

December

Recently FedScoop honored federal technology leaders, innovators and rising stars at the first annual FedScoop 50 Awards. It is my pleasure to announce that Gunnar Hellekson our chief technology strategist was a recipient of the Industry Leadership Award. You may read more here on the awards ceremony held on November 28, 2012. Here are a few words from Goldy Kamali, CEO of FedScoop, “We have the pleasure of working with the most brilliant people in both government and tech community every day. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to celebrate the achievements of 50 of the federal IT community’s brightest minds and innovators of 2012 and to recognize them for their dedication and service.”

In addition, Gunnar was featured in the magazine Linux Format, Issue 164. He was interviewed on Linux® adoption within public sector and featured on the front cover. Read his interview here. Congratulations to Gunnar on these high honors!

In closing, I hope you all have a happy and safe holiday, and we look forward to doing business with you in 2013. Happy New Year!

 

November

The Red Hat Government Symposium brought together more than 375 leaders from government and industry together to discuss how federal agencies can best explore and integrate open source software. This year we raised the bar with the most impressive list of keynote speakers yet! A special thanks goes out to all of our government and industry speakers and panelists including:

  • Dr. Peter Levin, senior advisor to the secretary & CTO, Dept. of Veterans Affairs
  • John Marshall, senior information systems technologist for Joint Staff Intelligence Directorate (J2), Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA
  • John B. Owens, II, chief information officer, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
  • Jill Tummler Singer, chief information officer, National Reconnaissance Office

Click here for the recap.

The keynotes and breakout sessions delivered perspective on how agencies fully utilize open source technologies to open government and achieve OMB mandates. Thank you to all of our presenters, sponsors, and attendees who helped make this year's Red Hat Government Symposium a success. We are already looking forward to our 9th annual Symposium next year!

 

October

This past year has been an exciting and productive one for Red hat—both as a company and within the government user community, so we’re excited to share many of these developments with you at Red Hat’s Government Symposium on Tuesday, October 23. Our line up of speakers include Peter Levin, CTO, Dept of Veterans Affairs, John Marshall CTO, USPTO and more. You can see the full list of government and industry speakers here.

The Red Hat Government Symposium is always an excellent event for our team, partners and customers to discuss how open source helps agencies at all levels meet mission-critical IT demands. This year our conference theme is “Exploring the Freedom of Open Source” and our hope is that you’ll join us and it will provide you with more ideas on how to help your agency achieve its IT goals in a more cost-effective and efficient way.

 

September

This time of year has everyone in Public Sector with their heads down focusing on closing out the year, finalizing a plan for their remaining budget, and beginning plans for next year.

IT departments are continuing to focus on datacenter consolidation, shared first, and lowering overall IT expenditures. Developing these plans for any agency, company, or IT department can be a daunting challenge. At Red Hat, we can help. At the upcoming Government Symposium you'll hear from leaders like Dr. Peter Levin, Senior Advisor to the Secretary & CTO, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, John B. Owens II, CTO, US Patent and Trademark office and many others open source in government, and more. Hear about what your peers in government are looking to focus on next year and the role open source will play in their plans.

Let us know what we can do to help your agency develop a plan to achieve success in this new Fiscal year.

 

August

I’d like to share with you an article that interviews Chris Aniszczyk, Open Source Manager at Twitter. He details their Open Source story and how and why they use it. Without open source, Twitter wouldn#39;t exist. Every Tweet you send and receive touches open source software on its journey between computers and mobile devices.

Here is an excerpt from his interview:

How much open source software is used behind the scenes of a Tweet?
We use a lot of open source software. In my opinion, it’s a no-brainer as open source software allows us to customize and tweak code to meet our fast-paced engineering needs as our service and community grows. When we plan new engineering projects at Twitter, we always make sure to measure our requirements against the capabilities of open source offerings, and prefer to consume open source software whenever it makes sense. Through this method, much of Twitter is now built on open source software, and as a result the open source way is now a pervasive part of our culture. On top of that, there is a positive cycle of teaching and learning within open source communities that we benefit from.

Read more of Twitters use of Open Source here.

 

July

With virtualization, cloud computing, mobile devices and social media helping to drive adoption, the market opportunity for scale-out storage is growing rapidly. Industry analysts estimate revenue for the scale-out storage market will reach more than $18 billion by 2015, a more than 20 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Enterprise Strategy Group further estimates that by 2015, 80 percent of all new external networked storage shipment revenue will come from systems based on scale-out architectures, and that externally networked scale-out storage shipments in commercial and government sectors will increase from 4,189 petabytes (PB) in 2010 to 62,834 PB in 2015, reflecting a 72 percent CAGR that exceeds the overall external networked storage growth rate of 54 percent.

Red Hat Storage is designed to address organizations’ growing needs around the management of unstructured data, and through ecosystem collaboration with Red Hat, leading solution providers can leverage the open and flexible nature of Red Hat Storage and can develop unique solutions that give the power of choice back to customers.

Read more about our storage alliances here and about Red Hat Storage here.

 

June

Red Hat Annual Summit and JBoss World 2012 was an amazing success! Thank you to all that attended our Public Sector and Academic Luncheon. The discussion and questions were thought provoking and insightful around Cloud, Big Data and Mobile. With Red Hat’s announcements about their Cloud offerings there was plenty to see and hear at Summit.

A total of 4 open hybrid cloud solutions were announced including:

  • OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution
  • Red Hat Hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution
  • Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle
  • Red Hat Storage

Red Hat Storage is available today. The OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, Red Hat Hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution and Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle offerings are expected to be available this summer.

Read more on the newly announced bundles here and other Summit 2012 news here.

 

May

Don’t miss Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012. Different Spot. Same great city. This year’s Summit will take place June 26 – 29 at the Hynes Convention Center in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay. A perfect opportunity to learn about the latest and greatest Red Hat has to offer, plus network with Red Hat Executives, engineers, developers and most importantly your peers.

While your there join us for the Public Sector and Academic Luncheon on June 28, Thursday at 11:30am at the Hynes Convention Center in Ballroom C (3rd Floor).

Ten years ago, open source could be a risky business. Now, it's the secret behind all the buzzwords of the day: Cloud, Big Data and Mobile. So is open source different now? Have customers changed? Have the vendors? This candid discussion between Ed Boyajian, CEO of EnterpriseDB, and Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat's US Public Sector group will look back on ten years of growth and imagine what the next ten years have in store for open source and government. Don't miss this unique opportunity to network with your colleagues in the federal, state, and education markets and learn how open source is changing the game in government.

Register here

I look forward to seeing you and your team at Summit!

 

April

I’d like to share some great news: Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5 with the KVM hypervisor has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). As many of you know, the Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used to assess the security and assurance of technology products. This security certification is the first of its kind for an open source virtualization solution.

With this new certification, the KVM hypervisor on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM x86-based servers now meet government security standards, allowing open virtualization to be used in homeland security projects, command-and-control operations, and throughout government agencies that previously were limited to proprietary virtualization technologies. This security certification paves the way for governments, financial institutions, and other security-conscious agencies to create secure, open virtualized IT environments and private clouds.

Open virtualization offers government agencies the opportunity to reduce costs and increase choice with the enterprise-grade KVM hypervisor.

This certification highlights the combined power of SELinux and KVM, and we expect it to pave the way for broader adoption of the private cloud-computing infrastructure in government agencies. SELinux addresses common government agency concerns about implementing virtualization, because it provides for virtual resources to run in separate containers and protect each one individually in case of intrusion.

 

March

Recently I was asked by Washington Exec to answer a few questions around open source technology, cloud computing, and the benefits for both public and private business sectors. Here#39;s an excerpt from the thought-provoking Q and A:

Q: How do you see the collaboration between industry and government evolving when it comes to open source?

A: We’ve gotten to a point in open source adoption in government where the principles are being widely used as a way to promote enterprise architectures that are vendor neutral and allow more freedom. By embracing open architecture, the government becomes a key collaborator with industry where the best minds can come together to develop and use open source solutions to solve our biggest challenges. The result is best-in-breed solutions that benefit both the public and private sector; for example the Navy developing real-time Linux that is now being used on Wall Street.

  • See the entire interview (and feel free to leave comments in the form following the Q and A to let us know your thoughts and the challenges you#39;ve overcome with open source technology)

 

February

Each year Red Hat brings together many of the world’s top open source and technology thought leaders to discuss solutions to your technology challenges at Red Hat Summit and JBoss® World. I invite you to join me for this exciting event June 26 – 29 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA.

This 3-day event features keynote addresses, interactive discussions, product demonstrations, and hands-on labs centered on how to deliver optimal results utilizing open source products and technologies. Your agency depends on you to meet today’s IT demands. Learn how Red Hat strengthens your existing architecture at every layer at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.

Don’t miss General Hugh Shelton, Red Hat's chairman of the board and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will be delivering the initial keynote at Summit.

 

January

I’m sure by now you all have seen the news that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is now available! With over 1,000 features and enhancements, 50% of our largest customers have already begun deploying or piloting Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

A single vendor has dominated server virtualization technology for several years, leading to the attendant issues associated with a single-vendor market: pricing, migration, and integration. Fortunately, our open source virtualization solution is now available that will make implementing virtualized servers easier, more cost-effective, and more compatible with your agency's long-term strategies.

Powered by the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 offers a superior balance of enterprise virtualization performance and scalability, management, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

And perhaps most important to you, Red Hat Secure Virtualization (sVirt) is the industry’s most comprehensive security solution for virtualization, with its unique kernel-level architecture and NSA-developed security mechanism that isolates each VM as a protected process.

Seeing is believing, so I invite you to try Red Hat Enterprise 3’s 60-day supported evaluation and tell us what you think on Twitter @RedHatGov.

 

December

The Red Hat Government Symposium brought together more than 300 leaders from government and industry to discuss how federal agencies can best implement the Office of Management and Budget’s 25-Point Plan. This year we raised the bar with the most impressive list of keynote speakers yet! A special thanks goes out to all of our government and industry speakers and panelists including:

The keynotes and breakout sessions delivered perspective on how agencies fully utilize open source technologies to open government and achieve the Cloud First policy. Listen to our thought leadership interviews recorded during the event. If you were unable to attend you can:

Thank you to all of our customers for making 2011 such a great year. We have enjoyed working with you on all of your agency needs and requirements. Have a safe and happy holiday season and we look forward to seeing you in the new year!

 

November

This past year has been an exciting and productive one for Red Hat—both as a company and within the government user community, so we’re excited to share many of these developments with you at Red Hat’s Government Symposium on Wednesday Nov. 16. Our line-up of speakers include Maj. Gen. Nick Justice; Chris Vein, US deputy CTO, Executive Office of the President, and more.

The Red Hat Government Symposium is always an exciting event for our team, partners, and customers to discuss how open source and cloud computing are transforming IT. This year our conference theme is “Your Roadmap to the 25-Point Plan,” and our hope is that you’ll join us and it will provide you with more ideas on how to help your agency achieve its IT goals in a more cost-effective and efficient way.

 

September

This time of year has everyone in Public Sector with their heads down focusing on closing out the year, finalizing a plan for their remaining budget and beginning plans for next year.

IT Departments are continuing to focus on Kundra’s plans around data-center consolidation, “Cloud first” policy, and lowering overall IT expenditures. Developing these plans for any agency, company or IT department can be a daunting challenge. Red Hat can help. At the upcoming Government Symposium you#39;ll hear from leaders like Bajinder Paul, Deputy Associate Administrator, GSA, Major General Nick Justice from RDECOM & APG, U.S. Army, Dr. Peter Levin, Senior Advisor to the Secretary & CTO, Dept. of Veterans Affairs and many others on Cloud Computing best practices, open source in government, and more. Red Hat is also hosting an educational 4-part webinar series titled "From virtualization to private cloud" where you will learn how to develop a cloud strategy that fits your agency#39;s objectives.

Let us know what we can do to help your agency develop a plan to achieve success in this new Fiscal year.

 

August

The definition of innovation is:

  1. The introduction of something new.
  2. A new idea, method, or device.

Vivek Kundra brought this to his position as US chief information officer. He clearly saw the value in cloud computing and the advantage it provides the federal government. The idea to be able to adapt quickly to change, economically and in a secure flexible manner, Kundra initiated a shift to a "cloud first#39; policy.

It#39;s no secret that the open source development model drives innovation, faster. As the leading open source solutions provider in the world, Red Hat brings innovation to the cloud and helps agencies build not only a better cloud, but a more open one. We give you back your freedom of choice. Choice of platform, choice of virtualization, choice of cloud provider.

There is a reason the largest public clouds run on open source. I welcome you to join us at the Red Hat Government Symposium this November to hear more about eliminating vendor lock-in, security in the cloud, and other ways in which open source solutions can help your agency. Hear from industry experts on how to develop your cloud strategy and save your agency time and money.

 

July

The only thing hotter than the weather in DC this month is the battle in Congress over the debt ceiling. However this fight resolves, it#39;s obvious that federal agencies are going to join their friends in the state and local governments in their own battle: serving their missions with far, far less than before.

Red Hat has always been about driving costs from an organization. Traditionally, we#39;ve provided high-quality alternatives to your expensive, legacy systems. But cutting costs is about far more than software alternatives.

How you manage your software can be just as important as choosing which software to run. You don#39;t want to rebuild servers by hand each time, and you certainly don#39;t want to waste time checking each one for things like FISMA and the DISA STIG. Centralized management, standard builds, and automated configuration tools are crucial to keeping your staff efficient. And once you#39;re ready for a cloud deployment, having these processes in place will let you take full advantage of an on-demand, elastic infrastructure.

So if you haven#39;t considered our management tools, like Red Hat Network Satellite and the JBoss Operations Network, now is a great time. Your staff will thank you for it.

 

May

We#39;ve recovered from an amazing week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. It was our largest Summit ever, and it was great to spend time with our friends and partners, meet our engineers face-to-face, and find out what Red Hat#39;s planning for the next year.

Speaking of which, we had some really exciting announcements. Two will be especially interesting to the public sector:

  1. We unveiled CloudForms. The CloudForms System Engine, Application Engine, and Cloud Engine work together to help you build, manage, and automate cloud infrastructures on an open source platform, without vendor lock-in.
     
  2. On the JBoss side of the house, we announced OpenShift, a PaaS tailored specifically for developers. You can use your choice of platforms and languages, and it#39;s dead-simple to use. Even before the keynote was over, we had folks running their applications on it!

 

April

Every month, we have more and more happening in the public sector and we couldn#39;t be more excited:

Red Hat Summit and JBoss World

The Red Hat Summit and JBoss World return to Boston on May 3rd! There#39;s no better way to meet the community of partners, developers, and users who make our software so remarkable. Don#39;t forget our Government Breakfast on May 5th!

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Beta

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Beta has started, and it includes improvements to virtualization performance, new hardware support, better development and monitoring tools, and much more.

Open Advantage magazine

Red Hat#39;s launched a new magazine! Open Advantage gives us a chance to talk at a higher level about industry trends, strategies, and market dynamics from an open source point of view. Check out the Government section!

opensource.com

If you#39;re more inclined to up-to-date news, check out opensource.com, a Red Hat community effort that discusses the latest news and opinions from the open source community. They have a government channel, too!

Finally, I want to say that on behalf of the Red Hat US Public Sector team, we#39;re as relieved as you are that the budget logjam appears to have broken, our friends in federal offices across the country have avoided a furlough, and our agencies and offices can all go back to the business of performing the people#39;s business. Let#39;s get back to work!