Friday Five — May 27, 2016

BBVA announced a global strategic collaboration with global provider of enterprise open source solutions Red Hat, Inc. aimed at helping accelerate BBVA's global transformation and technology-driven innovation processes. The agreement, which turns Red Hat into a priority partner for BBVA, is part of a series of alliances that BBVA is aiming to forge with strategic partners... The partnership is designed to focus on business and technical alignment to support BBVA to accelerate innovation, manage the growth of financial transactions on digital devices and deliver digital banking services to its global customers... The new IaaS and PaaS-based platform by Red Hat will enable BBVA to focus on developing applications that can support the heavy demands of global digital bank services and provide customers with the service and information they want and when it is needed.

Red Hat updated its recently acquired Ansible technology with a new version that provides enhanced support for Docker container deployment as well as Microsoft technologies... "Ansible had some Microsoft modules and a few older Azure modules previously," Todd Barr, general manager of Ansible at Red Hat, told eWEEK. "With this release, however, we are now officially supporting Windows as a platform on par with Linux and have covered most of the major Azure use cases." The Microsoft support, according to Barr, makes Ansible truly cross-platform and hybrid cloud-ready. Ansible 2.1 also provides enhanced Docker container capabilities, enabling organizations to build, deploy and manage container applications.

So what is the difference between a software solution that is open and one that is open source? First, consider that word: "open". When a vendor says their solution is "open" the vendor typically offers an application programming interface (API). An API could allow another application to consume data that another solution produces. For example, a financial application might have an API that provides global financial market data to their partners, who consume the data by writing applications that conform to the API... [However] an open API is not the same as open source software... Verify that the source code is freely available and the solution can be modified and distributed without violating a license... If embracing open source is part of your organization's strategy to enable interoperability, ask your vendor(s) to detail their approach, and how it aligns to the characteristics of true open source. If it doesn't, "open" alone may not be enough to give you the interoperability and flexibility you are seeking.

For many years, open source software seemingly lay at the fringe of the tech industry. A subculture that many didn"t understand and that seemingly threatened the broader industry. It is amazing how much has changed. Today, open source software, especially Linux, is so pervasive that you probably interact with it every day. From supercomputers to GoPros and nearly every data center in the world, open source software is the default platform... So, why the shift? The reason so many doubters have changed their mind about open source software lies in a recognition of the importance of platforms... Open source projects have a number of advantages over proprietary software in their ability to become broad, industry-accepted platforms: By design, many entities are contributing and building off the code base–and the ultimate consumers are also deeply involved from an early stage. They have a broad diversity of ideas, with contributors from both the largest companies and small innovative startups. [And] They are well resourced.

An open organization is the opposite of the traditional top-down hierarchy; in an open organization, things bubble up from the "bottom" and leadership treats employees differently. In an open organization, everyone in the company understands the big picture for its future, leadership make decisions with input from others, and the company as a whole is more innovative. Open organizations compete in today's markets in a totally different way than traditional companies. Red Hat, which provides open source solutions, is one such open organization. Others include Google, The Body Shop and Whole Foods. Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat, has literally written the book on the concept. The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance is a starter kit for operating such a business. It introduces the concepts that make an open organization work: passionate, engaged workers; meritocracy where team members share their best ideas and others qualify them; and, inclusive decision making processes.