Friday Five — October 2, 2015

Red Hat turned in solid financial results as its quarterly subscription revenue rose 13% or $504 million for the second quarter of its fiscal 2016 as CEO Jim Whitehurst and the company's new CFO, Frank Calderoni, staked out a future for the company in the cloud operations... Whitehurst cited the cloud revenues, a small fraction of its total, as a sign that Red Hat has a firm grip on future revenues based on cloud computing. Some of them will come from direct sales of cloud software subscriptions and some will come from IT departments' expanded utilization of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run cloud production workloads.

Open source is ground zero for technology development. Once software vendors would open source software that, to put it kindly, wasn't worth monetizing anymore. Now open source has become the preferred way of germinating hot new technology, particularly for startups... [But] it's still tough to be an independent vendor of open source software. Those few vendors who stick to the traditional pay-for-support-only model tend to struggle, whereas an increasing number of "commercial open source" companies offer multi-tiered subscriptions that recall the proprietary world... No matter. Nothing is going to stop the open source juggernaut. As a puffed-up VC might put it, the code-sharing economy has achieved its network effect. That awesome engine of collective creativity is transforming the entire technology industry.

Red Hat has announced new OpenStack training and certification programmes for engineers, which it hopes will help organisations fill skills gaps while also introducing companies to Red Hat's solutions. Two programmes have been debuted: the first is an IT engineer-level OpenStack certification, comprising Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in Red Hat OpenStack, and accompanying exam, while the second is an IT-engineer-level course, Red Hat OpenStack Administration III... Red Hat said the course provides a number of benefits to employers, including simplified onboarding of staff while helping them adopt new OpenStack releases.

"My Linux story begins like that of so many others—with an old computer and a desire to tinker. It was the late 1990s when I read an article about a UNIX-like operating system, "Linux," I could download and install for free... This thing called "Linux" promised something different, a kind of openness and flexibility that seemed like the perfect prescription for my ailing laptop at the time. So I took the plunge, installed Slackware, and began using Linux... In the technology world today, Linux has become the platform around which innovative people are building the next generation of computing. People are building the most exciting applications, languages, and frameworks to run on Linux. It's the default platform for burgeoning technological ecosystems around problems like big data, mobile, and analytics. Without Linux, all this activity simply wouldn't exist." —Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat

Historically, middleware technologies have been heavy, large-footprint tools used by enterprises to build monolithic applications and install them on a mainframe or physical server in a data center. In contrast, modern middleware tools are much lighter and boast smaller footprints, allowing them to be deployed in cloud environments and consumed as services by IT. Arguably, one of the greatest drivers comes from the move toward cloud-based enterprise application development... Mainstream acceptance and adoption of the cloud has subsequently given rise to new IT paradigms such as DevOps that help enterprise IT become more nimble and bring products to market faster... Thanks in part to the efficiency and flexibility of cloud environments, DevOps teams can turn new service concepts into actionable products in hours rather than days or weeks.