Friday Five — December 16, 2016

As 2016 comes to a close and we look to the new year, we were keen to hear from Red Hat customers about their plans for 2017, including their top initiatives, cloud deployment strategies, and plans for innovative technologies. To gather these insights, we surveyed 268 Red Hat customers from six industries and 13 countries. Last year's survey revealed some areas of increasing strategic focus (private cloud, DevOps, big data, mobile and IoT initiatives), and reinforced the unsurprising need for IT to do more with less. The Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2017 built on these results, and highlighted respondents' mindshift towards responding to–or creating their own disruption–by not only using digital capabilities to create new business models, services, or products, but also embracing the culture and process changes often required to successfully do so. View the full blog post and accompanying infographic to see the results.

Red Hat is now accepting nominations through February 17, 2017 for the Red Hat Certified Professional (RHCP) of the Year award. Tell us why you should be the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year or nominate someone you know. The winner will receive a complimentary pass to the 2017 Red Hat Summit, airfare and hotel accommodations. At Red Hat Summit, the winner will be a VIP guest, recognized by CEO Jim Whitehurst. In addition, eligible nominees receive a $25 gift card to the new Red Hat Certified Professional Store as a thank you for participation in the contest.

KeyBank, one of the United States' largest bank-based financial services companies, found that application delivery resulted in complexity growth over time. KeyBank's DevOps team began considering a container-based application platform, seeking to decrease complexity by isolating applications from the underlying infrastructure and helping development teams get to work with minimal configuration and management time. In seven months, KeyBank completed product evaluation, selection, and migration of multiple applications to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and built its container-centric environments for development, testing, staging and production. KeyBank can now look forward to application release cycles with little to no downtime. Additionally, analysis shows that 60 percent of defects are now resolved within a day. KeyBank now plans to spread its DevOps teams into other projects in order to help scale the practice across the organization.

Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, the company's massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. Based on the upstream OpenStack 'Newton' release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives new features that increase system-wide scalability, ease infrastructure management, and improve orchestration, while also enhancing network performance and platform security. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a new software life cycle, with optional support up to 5 years. New enhancements and updates to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 include: A more streamlined user experience, improved flexibility for greater scalability, greater data assurance, improved performance for network-intensive workloads, and a new "ready state" hardware certification program.

The New York Stock Exchange welcomed Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) on December 12 in celebration of Red Hat's 10th anniversary of listing. Jim Whitehurst, CEO, rang The NYSE Opening Bell® and was accompanied by other
Red Hat executives and guests. Watch the recorded video of the event.