Friday Five — October 7, 2016

While the smallest in terms of revenue contribution, Asia is Red Hat's fastest growing region and is likely to continue its upwards trajectory as emerging markets roll out new infrastructure. ... Asia contributed roughly 12.75 percent of the vendor's overall fiscal 2016 revenue, ended February 29... According to September 2016 research from Forrester, 50 percent of IT decision makers in Asia-Pacific believed open source could help their organisation support new capabilities... With Red Hat the first open source company to hit revenues exceeding US$2 billion, [Red Hat CEO Jim] Whitehurst said its business model remained durable and in good shape. Adding that it had more opportunities than capacity to address, he said the vendor's primary objective was to build enterprise versions of open source products and make these consumable. Specifically, Red Hat aimed to take more market share in the datacentre market and ensure all its products supported all hybrid cloud environments and across the entire stack. It also was betting big on containers, which Whitehurst believed would pave the way future applications were built.

Taking the step to invest in an Internet of Things (IoT) strategy, and ensuing implementation, can be an important part of your organization's digital transformation. There are many things that should be taken into consideration from vendor selection to understanding if your current infrastructure can support an IoT project to the plans to deal with the information generated by these connected "things". There is going to be a lot of noise from the vendor community over the next few years. It is important that your organization partners with vendor(s) that can help guide the process from concept to deployment to maintenance. However, when evaluating vendors, one criteria to consider is their support and/or interoperability with open standards. ... It is also important for the organization to understand not only the short term gains of its IoT investment but also the longer term implications of the information that the connected "things" will generate. ... Many IoT projects are initially focused on driving internal, or operational, change. However, over the longer term, these changes can begin to affect external factors. Those organizations that have the foresight to understand these long range implications may have the benefit of capturing those improvements sooner than others as it's on their radar.

Red Hat is accepting nominations for the 2017 Red Hat Innovation Awards. The Red Hat Innovation Awards have recognized Red Hat's global customers and partners for the transformative projects and outstanding results they have experienced with Red Hat's open source solutions. Organizations can submit nominations in five categories, and winners will be selected based on the uniqueness, complexity, and magnitude of their
Red Hat implementations. Submissions will be accepted until Nov. 9, 2016, and will be evaluated by a panel of business and open source technology experts. One winner will be chosen in each category. From those winners, the 2017 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting, and will be announced during an awards ceremony at the 2017 Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Flytoget, operator of the airport express train in Norway's capital Oslo, is halfway through a four-year digital transformation project in the face of increasing competition in transportation services. New competitors such as Uber and Lyft have forced Flytoget's hand to provide digital customer services. ... A major step for the programme has been the deployment of Red Hat's JBoss Fuse integration platform and application programming interface (API) management tools from 3Scale, which Red Hat acquired in June 2016. For Flytoget, this means a shift from scattered integration implementations to a shared, more structured system with improved control over its APIs and their scalability. Hole sees the transition as a vital part of the state-owned company's efforts to modernise its IT capabilities and create new services for customers. "The benefits of this investment are that with standardised interfaces and good management of APIs, both internally and externally, we can create faster projects," Hole said. "We needed a new technical platform, and a competent contractor to help us build a solid foundation to be fast and efficient in facing new integration opportunities. [This was] the rationale for the decision."

Seneca College, one of Canada's largest colleges, prides itself on delivering the latest, best technology to its students and faculty. But the IT infrastructure running its learning management system was complex, costly, and slow. By standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the college saved more than CA$100,000 and increased performance speed to around 100 times faster. In addition, implementing an open, private cloud based on Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat OpenStack Platform has helped the college create a foundation for future automation of IT resource delivery.