Friday Five — November 13, 2015

The walls that began a-tumblin' down when Microsoft and Red Hat announced their historic partnership agreement last week, just keep on a-fallin'. In time for the KubeCon conference going on in San Francisco, Red Hat released for general availability version 3.1 of its OpenShift platform. This new version establishes critical bridges that didn't exist before that link major parts of its technology stack – some of which were Red Hat's parts to begin with. With OpenShift, it will soon be feasible for distributed applications built on OpenShift to incorporate the recently open-sourced .NET Core – which, we learned, Red Hat will now distribute – as well as Red Hat's JBoss Fuse Enterprise Service Bus, plus Red Hat Gluster distributed file storage, and the Red Hat Ceph software-defined data access.

Where are you storing your most critical data? How are you protecting your infrastructure from vulnerabilities? Gain a deeper understanding of the critical role of secure technology in your IT strategy in "Secure Foundations for Today and Tomorrow | A Red Hat virtual event." Join security subject matter experts and Red Hat customer IKEA to discuss topics including tools and technologies designed to keep your infrastructure secure, real-world perspectives on vulnerability detection and response, and Red Hat's proactive, open source approach to IT security. One lucky attendee will get the chance to continue the security conversation at the 2016 RSA Conference in San Francisco. And even if you're not the grand prize winner, you can still win 1 of 5 $100 IKEA gift cards.

Red Hat's approach to software goes against the traditional licensing model and vendor lock-in. The software industry is filled with companies selling monolithic software, holding on to the antiquated approach of licensing and upgrade fees, in addition to a maintenance contract. The upfront costs of this approach–moving from outdated, unsupported versions–can be painful and unwieldy. Red Hat decided that wasn't a sustainable model more than a decade ago and our services and software have been available through a subscription model ever since. A Red Hat subscription gives you access to enterprise-ready software, updates, and information and support services that span your entire application infrastructure, life cycle, and architecture. You can count on receiving the latest product versions with the stability and security you've come to expect from Red Hat. With clear and manageable upgrade paths and product life cycles, you won't be caught off guard with mandatory updates. You can rely on security patches and bug fixes being delivered for the entire life of the product.

Microsoft and Red Hat will now partner to deploy Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. To be clear, this means that Microsoft is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the 'preferred choice' for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure. To be even clearer, this means that Microsoft is recommending that we use another company's operating system for Linux jobs on its cloud... Both companies have said that they are working together to address common software application development needs when building applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds. So this means that Red Hat solutions will be available 'natively' on the Microsoft Azure cloud. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. Equally, Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure.

When one discusses digital transformation or even something as vital as succession plan, a question that comes up is who among the C-suite member can take up the digital leadership role. While some believe the obvious choice would be the CIO...a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey sponsored by Red Hat revealed most CEOs do not think their CIO is up to the task. This indicates that digital goes beyond 'mere technology practice' in the firm. The report also identified a gap between the knowledge and skills needed to drive digital transformation with less than a quarter of business leaders saying that their organizations are inadequately prepared for a digital technology-driven future... Experts believe, irrespective of which individual or role becomes the digital champion, it is important that the C-suite must cooperate to take up data-driven decisions, build communities such as ecosystem collaboration, social media, open innovation, crowd-sourcing and customer engagement, and practice an open culture. Until then, the digital leadership gap will continue to remain.