Friday Five — May 22, 2015

The Open Organization is about creating a successful business in today's enormously fast-moving technology climate. In his book, Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, shares "the methodology that has made open source software the standard for many of today's organizations and appl[ies] it to the way business is run." One article is already calling it "the best business book of the year". Read a portion of the book, join the community discussion, and follow @OpenOrgBook for updates.

The OpenStack enterprise adoption survey of more than 310 IT decision makers and professionals from around the world, commissioned by Red Hat through TechValidate, found that the majority of respondents (75 percent) are planning to use OpenStack for cloud initiatives. The survey found respondents in varying stages of deployment, ranging from learning and evaluation (40 percent) and proof of concept / pilots (40 percent) to preparing for deployment (18 percent) and in production (16 percent). The survey results show that deployment plans for OpenStack workloads span the physical, virtual, private and public cloud footprints.

Research released by Red Hat, in association with TechValidate, has revealed some interesting strategies over how organisations approach mobile applications. Do they build their own, do they go for rapid mobile app development (RMAD), or mobile backend as a service (MBaaS)?... 41% of survey respondents said backend integration was a key challenge when developing enterprise mobile apps. 25% said they had coded from scratch, while 21% had used a combination of external libraries and specialist vendors' services... Even though security continues to be a concern for the mobile enterprise, backend integration is where many "are hitting a wall", according to Red Hat VP mobile platforms Cathal McGloin. According to Steve O'Keefe, product line manager for mobile and JBoss middleware at Red Hat, enterprises have two concerns when they approach mobile; how do they make it secure, and how do they connect it to a backend system? Red Hat advocates an MBaaS-centric approach.

With offices in nearly 150 countries and all 7 continents, AECOM is one of the industry's largest and most diverse providers of fully integrated architecture engineering, construction, and technical services. Using Red Hat JBoss Middleware, AECOM Oil and Gas integrated four systems to create an end-to-end solution for the management of critical information for all phases of large construction projects, reducing the days needed to create a bid from 125 to fewer than 20.

People gravitate toward the best ideas. In 2004, Linux® was a lot like OpenStack is today. OpenStack is growing fast, supported by a community of individuals and enterprises, and creates a standard platform we can all use to build open, massively scalable clouds. That's why we believe OpenStack represents the best of what technology offers.