The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat® blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about
Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught our eye.


IN THE NEWS:

The Wall Street Journal: CIO Journal - Red Hat CEO Says Users Are Driving Business Software Innovation

The center of innovation in business software has shifted toward users in the corporate world, according to Jim Whitehurst, CEO of open-source software pioneer Red Hat Inc. "If you look at so much that is happening in open source software, it is users driving more innovation than vendors," Mr. Whitehurst told CIO Journal. Open source software is free to use, although companies such as Red Hat build businesses by offering services that support open code. "Ten years ago, open source software was all about commoditizing IT... To me, the things that have happened in open source during the last five years are more interesting. Users have developed IT infrastructure," he said. The adoption of software containers has been at the top of the CIO agenda during the last few years, according to Mr. Whitehurst. Software containers, which allow pieces of applications to be distributed across any sort of device, are viewed as a way to reduce the cost of running software and make software developers more efficient. "If a developer is 20% more efficient, than feature velocity is 20% more efficient. At a time when more and more companies are digitally enabled, that developer efficiency is critical and increases the value of IT to the business," he said.


IN THE NEWS:

InfoWorld - Who's cashing in on containers? Look to the cloud

Everyone seems to be collecting cash from this container revolution, and some of the more obvious beneficiaries are the companies building the orchestration engines used to manage containers at scale, most obviously Docker Inc. and Mesosphere. Both companies claim to be pulling in serious money from their commercial offerings. Red Hat also plays in this market, monetizing containers through OpenShift. The company's OpenShift business has boomed in the last few quarters. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst declared in the company's latest earnings call, the company has sold "over 50 OpenShift deals alone that were six or seven figures," with two delivering more than $10 million and one in excess of $5 million. That means Red Hat is making more from Docker than Docker Inc., as I've argued before. Yet just as the biggest beneficiaries of big data infrastructure like Hadoop aren't the obvious Hadoop vendors (Cloudera, Hortonworks) but instead the public cloud vendors (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure), so too will these cloud vendors dominate container revenues.


GOOD READ:

PCQuest - 86% CIOs in India Bank on Open Source for Digital Innovation

Red Hat has announced the results of a commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Red Hat, about the use of open source in digital innovation initiatives in the Asia Pacific region. The results revealed that IT decision makers in India are turning to open source to drive digital innovation to support business with new capabilities. The research surveyed 455 CIOs and senior IT decision makers from nine countries in Asia Pacific. The insights gathered reflect that 73 percent of respondents from India regard open source as a cost-saving initiative. The survey respondents from India believe that technology innovation is either "very important" or "critical" to their organization's success. Motivated by benefits such as faster implementation and improved flexibility, organizations have considered including open source as an integral part of their strategy to deliver new customer experiences, services, and products more quickly. The research also predicts that over the next two to three years, the role of open source will accelerate.


CHECK IT OUT:

opensource.com - Happy birthday to Opensource.com: 7 years of open source

In celebrating 7 years of opensource.com, we are taking a look back at how we've grown since our start in 2010. From our first year, we've evolved our editorial focus to match what our readers want. Last year, we focused much more on technology topics, while continuing to cover how open source goes beyond technology. In 2017, we hope to reach even larger, broader audiences with powerful stories of "open." In addition to celebrating our birthday, we're launching our 2016 Open Source Yearbook. The yearbook rounds up the top projects, technologies, and stories from 2016. Get the free download.


CUSTOMER SUCCESS:

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) Deploys Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to Accelerate IT Modernization

Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB, Swiss Federal Railways), Switzerland's national railways company, is not only the largest travel and transport company in Switzerland, but it is also among the biggest employers in the country. SBB's traditional IT systems were struggling to cope with the pace of innovation. SBB decided to implement Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as the platform for its modern IT program. With the new solution, SBB has created a scalable and more agile platform for its application development, and is delivering new services, including an updated mobile application, to better serve the millions of passengers who travel via SBB each year. The SBB mobile app, built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, enables customers to buy tickets and access a touch timetable, receive real-time information on arrival and departure times, and receive push notifications and reminders from SBB. The new container-based platform also allows developers and operations teams to act independently, helping SBB to achieve more agility and speed in its application development. Running costs for SBB have also been reduced by aproximately 50 percent.



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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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