Friday Five — February 10, 2017

Artificial and biological brains are at work in Red Hat's foray into predictive analytics for IT monitoring and management. Red Hat Insights is a software as a service product to help users manage critical assets in the IT infrastructure proactively. This Red Hat performance monitoring as a service uses predictive IT analytics to catch issues before they become problems. The analysis is checked against the Red Hat knowledgebase, which helps to determine if a found issue is already known. Based on that information, the product can calculate the likeliness of that issue becoming a real problem. The real value that Insights adds is the analysis of events that have occurred on the assets Red Hat monitors. This analysis is done in part by artificial intelligence, but also occurs under the supervision of Red Hat's experts. Insights isn't free, but as organizations are more frequently outsourcing IT, the cost of predictive IT analytics as a service doesn't have to be an issue.

Most higher education institutions seek to prepare their graduates to be "work ready", so it's no surprise that many of them have incorporated Linux-related content into their curricular programs. But building these courses so they match the expectations of enterprises, keeping them up-to-date as technology rapidly evolves, and properly supporting them with hands-on labs and exercises can be a complex, difficult, and costly undertaking. This is why Red Hat created the Red Hat Academy. Red Hat Academy provides curriculum to help education institutions keep pace with the demands of industry. The curriculum involves hands-on instruction across platform/Linux, middleware, and cloud technologies built with input from Red Hat's development, support, and field consulting teams. Red Hat Academy provides universities with access to our most updated curriculum, saving academies the cost of building and maintaining it on their own. We also provide instructor support, labs, and other functions that can make it much easier to successfully teach the technology in a cost-effective way.

Learn how Singapore Polytechnic has partnered with Red Hat Academy to prepare their students for stronger careers and support future open source contributors. Over the past 15 years, the school's students have gained access through this partnership to comprehensive open source technology certifications, such as Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).

Many service and subscription-based enterprises today have some version of a Technical Account Management program. For most organizations, Technical Account Management is a paid offering that can be purchased by customers. At Red Hat, we take great pride in our Technical Account Management program. We have a large, global network of Technical Account Managers (TAMs) servicing enterprise customers across the globe. With any program, team, or organization, when there is no clear vision and purpose, it's hard for its people to accomplish greatness. At Red Hat, our Technical Account Management program's primary goal and mission statement is: "To provide customers a personal connection into Red Hat and to facilitate engagement and success with Red Hat subscriptions." When our customers are successful with using our solutions, then we have done a good job. If you ever wondered why your team is not performing to your level of expectation or making a valuable impact to your customers, it is probably a good idea to review the goals and KPIs you have set for them. Are they clear, concise, and achievable?

Open source software is the norm these days rather than the exception. While having this code available can offer big benefits, users also must be wary of issues the code can present and implement proper vetting. Josh Bressers, cybersecurity strategist at Red Hat, emphasized this point during a recent talk with InfoWorld: I think we're starting to recognize that if you're just grabbing any piece of software you find from a commercial vendor or from the open-source community and you don't know what it is or it's not vetted and you don't know the quality, you put your final product's quality at risk. Fundamentally, what it comes down to is you need to understand where your software came from. From an organizational perspective, you need either a team paying attention and taking care of this, or you need to find a vendor to work with who will be your representative here and will do all the heavy lifting in terms of vetting the software. [Red Hat has] a team that's dedicated to paying attention to the open source universe, and they watch for security issues. We have a bunch of internal tools that will look at the artifacts that we build, which are making sure we're not making obvious mistakes or making sure that. We have dedicated build systems so we understand what's being built, how it's being built.