Friday Five — June 12, 2015

Want to learn more about a particular topic at Red Hat Summit, but not sure where to start? Check out the 5 content paths highlighting business and technical breakout session options focused on a particular topic or trend, such as mobile, internet of things, and containers. You can follow this path from start to finish, or pick the sessions that interest you most. There are also session tracks that organize the more than 200 breakout sessions to help navigate all of the options available at any given time. Each track has a unique solution-focus, but attendees will see a variety of products, demos, use cases, and more within a single track.

Alessandro Perilli, general manager for cloud management strategy at Red Hat, made the point in a blog post this week entitled Beware scary OpenStack support. "Enterprise-grade support for any open source project, and especially for one as complex as OpenStack, can be articulated through many dimensions. However, they are almost never part of the conversation until too late," he wrote. Perilli goes on to list six key dimensions that system administrators should be looking for: expertise in the underlying operating system; security response; certification and compliance; code indemnification; vertical consulting; and extended cloud management.

See how Red Hat Consulting and Cisco provide innovative OpenStack solutions for public sector customers.

Red Hat announced that two of its channel leaders have been named to The Channel Company's 2015 CRN® Women of the Channel list. This marks the third year in a row that Rachel Cassidy, vice president of Global Partner Enablement, and Margaret-Ann Bolton, senior director of Global Partner Marketing, have been recognized by CRN for their leadership, vision, and dedication to channel programs. In addition, this marks the second year in a row that Cassidy has been recognized as one of CRN's Power 100. The Power 100 spotlights an elite subset of Women of the Channel honorees whose insight and influence in their respective companies help drive channel success... The Women of the Channel will be featured in the June issue of CRN, and online at www.CRN.com.

Red Hat's President and CEO Jim Whitehurst had a background in turning round failing businesses like the US's Delta Air Lines. No management theorist, though with a background in management as a partner with The Boston Consulting Group, he found a different model at Red Hat, and has now written a book about it. In "The Open Organization", out this month, he argues for a way of working that is different from the usual hierarchichal structure in the IT industry: "If you can create a compelling reason for people to participate, they will." In the book (published by Harvard Business Review), he addresses how to knock down the walls of an organization in ways that allow collaboration from within as well as from customers, vendors, and partners.