Friday Five — August 21, 2015

Red Hat is emphasizing application container management, security and provisioning in the latest releases of its Satellite management suite for Red Hat Linux 7... Specifically, the Satellite upgrades focus on extending systems management into container deployments, a capability designed to give users of Docker containers greater control around versioning, authentication and integration with existing platforms.

Database Trends and Applications magazine (DBTA) announced its 2015 Readers' Choice Award winners recently, and two Red Hat JBoss Middleware products were named finalists: JBoss Data Grid, for Best In-Memory Database, and JBoss Data Virtualization, for Best Data Virtualization Solution... One of the macro-level trends fueling the interest and need for these types of technologies is the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) market and its impact on big data... Together, JBoss Data Grid and JBoss Data Virtualization allow historical data to be accessed more easily and correlated with more recent data... For IoT deployments to really make an impact, they must provide useful or actionable services. Just like with any big-data play, merely collecting the data isn't enough. The data must be processed, integrated, and analyzed to glean insights, and those insights must drive actionable steps that can improve the business.

In his new book, "The Open Organization", Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst writes about the need for companies to embrace a culture of collaboration, creativity, and openness... [These principles] are deeply ingrained in our corporate culture and evident in everything we do – including sales. This open and transparent culture is a big reason why we see a lot of interest from people wanting to join our sales team... But it takes a certain type of person to work with our sales team. Yes, passion is a requirement (that goes without saying), but so too is a willingness to adapt to a different type of culture. –Rick Akie, VP of North American Sales, Red Hat

We know that containers work best when they're a lifestyle, not just a technology choice. That means we can't just think about architecture, we also have to think about the processes we put around it. There are three big challenges that lay between containers-as-toy and containers-as-infrastructure: Containers demand a lot more automation than you have now. Containers make you an operating system vendor. Containers drive organizational changes... As you're going through this journey, it's important to keep your eye on the goal, which is not to run containers. The goal should be something much more meaningful, like "reduce wait time in the development process" or "get production code out of developers more quickly". –Gunnar Hellekson, director of product management, Linux and Virtualization, Red Hat

Gartner calls it 'bimodal IT'; Ovum calls it 'multimodal IT'... Whatever you choose to call it, they are all euphemisms for the same evolutions in IT: a shift towards deploying more user-centric, mobile-friendly software and services that [are] more scalable, flexible and easily integrated than the previous generation of IT services. And while the cloud has evolved as an essential delivery mechanism for the next generation of services, it's also prompting big changes in IT... "All of the innovation happening today in cloud is open source – think of Docker, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and you can’t really think of one pure proprietary offering that can match these in terms of the pace of innovation and the rate at which new features are being added," [Werner Knoblich, senior VP, Red Hat] explains... An effective open hybrid approach ultimately means not only embracing the open source solutions and technologies, but recognising that some large, monolithic applications... won't make it into this new world.