Friday Five — October 28, 2016

Swisscom, a leading telecoms provider in Switzerland and one of its leading IT companies, has selected Red Hat as its technology partner to help the company deliver a modern, agile, and highly scalable cloud platform. To help maintain a leading position while supporting a growing customer base looking to benefit from new and emerging digital services, Swisscom wanted to expand its cloud offerings. It required a technology platform that could provide the flexibility needed to support ongoing innovation and development–across both its own organization and customer base. Deploying Red Hat OpenStack^® Platform and Red Hat Virtualization as the basis of its new cloud infrastructure, Swisscom has been able to develop and deliver new digital products faster and more efficiently.

Produban, the IT services arm of the Spanish banking leader Grupo Santander, has picked Red Hat as its technology partner to create a modern cloud infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, marking what is believed to be one of the world's first production deployments of Kubernetes and containers on OpenStack. ... Its deployment is [also] believed to be the first hyperconverged OpenStack architecture solution in Spain, and among the first in the world, using Ceph. ... Produban has met its goal of creating a modern cloud platform to support the bank's global business. With its Red Hat-based platform, Produban has created a reliable, production-ready and controlled IaaS environment, while reducing its technology footprint and costs. With its cloud platform, Produban reports that it has not only increased agility, but reduced time-to-market for different services, including big data analytics. It now has a standardized and efficient IaaS environment with consistent management and deployment across its hybrid cloud services, including dedicated availability zones by region.

Last year, [Red Hat] surveyed our customer base on their use of OpenStack–while interest was high, most of the respondents were still learning about OpenStack clouds or developing proof-of-concepts. In this year's survey, however, conducted in September 2016, the results looked significantly different, with 43 percent of the global respondents stating that they are now using OpenStack in production, up from 16 percent a year ago. More than indicating a doubling of OpenStack production deployments from a year ago, trendlines indicate that: OpenStack is critical infrastructure for application development, especially with containers; built-in management tools aren't doing the job by themselves; customers want workload portability across OpenStack and other infrastructures; and organizations are looking for strong technical support.

Gartner, Inc. has positioned Red Hat in the "Visionaries" quadrant of Gartner's October 2016 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage. Gartner's Magic Quadrants are based on rigorous analysis of a vendor's completeness of vision and ability to execute. This is the first year Gartner has published a Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are both highly agile solutions that are built to handle different types of demanding workloads.

This year is the 6th annual North Bridge Venture Partners Future of Cloud Computing survey, conducted in partnership with Wikibon and multiple collaborating organizations to engage with cloud users, buyers and providers in a discussion around key issues that impact the industry's growth. We encourage you to take this 5-minute survey to share your organization's challenges and future goals in regards to cloud computing. The results will be published on the North Bridge website once the survey closes.