Friday Five — June 5, 2015

So how is Red Hat Summit valuable to your business? And how do you communicate the value of attending to your manager? From education to retail, and government to entertainment, Red Hat has the innovative, reliable solutions you need to power your business. And Red Hat Summit offers the training and knowledge-sharing you need to make those solutions work for your organization. See how your industry can benefit from the content at the 2015 event.

Are you looking for ways to deliver your applications more quickly and with less effort? Do you need to move more services to the cloud? Red Hat has these same issues and goals. By using our own product OpenShift, we have been able to shorten our release cycle times and support our developers better. We built and deployed our own OpenShift Enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and are running it in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This has allowed our teams to have more control over creating and developing their own applications in the cloud. OpenShift's automated workflows and tooling help our developers access what they need, when they need it.

Containers provide lightweight and efficient application isolation, and packages them together with any components they require to run. This avoids conflicts between apps that otherwise rely on key components of the underlying host operating system. According to a Forrester report commissioned by Red Hat, the benefits of containers are broad in scope with higher quality releases (31%), better application scalability (29%), and easier management (28%) cited as among the top three reasons to adopt containers... The lightweight isolation provided by containers allows them to be used to package up loosely-coupled services that may perform only a single, simple function such as reading a sensor, aggregating some data or sending a message. These small independent services that can operate independently of each other are often called ‘microservices‘.

In my experience as CEO of Red Hat, I've learned to keep the lines of communication open and find ways to connect with associates when I can, either in person when the opportunity presents itself, or virtually via email and other electronic correspondence. Being accessible and approachable is critical to effective leadership... As powerful as accessibility is–and without it engagement is impossible–I've learned that nothing builds engagement more than being accountable to the people in your organization. You simply have to have the confidence to own your mistakes and admit when you're wrong.

In order for organizations to compete and succeed in today's digital world, leaders across the business - not just those in IT - must prioritize their understanding of technology trends. The payoff for educating business leaders on digital trends can be compelling. Companies that excel in digital leadership were found to be significantly more likely to have experienced revenue growth of 10 percent or more over the last two years, according to the results of a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey of 436 global business professionals, sponsored by Red Hat as part of The Enterprisers Project. The report revealed a gap between the knowledge and skills needed to drive digital transformation and the reality within the walls of most organizations. It calls on CIOs to lead the education efforts around digital technology.