Friday Five — August 5, 2016

[T]he technological revolution has been accompanied by a slowdown in the growth of more traditional businesses. ... The rise of technology-based services has led to an increasing engagement with companies like Amazon, Facebook and Netflix, which rely on technology but don't physically manufacture or directly produce content. ... This points to one of the biggest trends of the current age: the rise of software-based companies. ... Consumer behaviour is evolving at a faster pace than many businesses can cope with. Consistently, across the board, traditional firms of all sectors are failing to deliver what their customers want and expect in the digital age. And, for those that fail to keep up, the impact can be substantial. ... To support this trend, vendors provide the necessary tools and application platforms under an open-source license that help companies develop their digital platform and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, or modernise existing applications. ... The SaaS model has taken off because it delivers flexibility in the underlying infrastructure while taking advantage of a business's existing IT investments. This has fuelled the rise of ‘weightless companies'; firms that can attain high valuations with minimal staff and capital. With technology changing the way companies operate, there are some significant trends that can help established companies stay ahead.

North Carolina-based Red Hat that provides open source software solutions to the enterprise community, has made its Satellite 6.2 generally available. Satellite 6.2 is Red Hat's systems lifecycle management tool across physical, virtual, and private and public cloud environments. The tool introduces remote implementation and extends capabilities for container management and security for container deployment. ... The company claims that cloud infrastructures continue to shift toward container-based deployments, customers increasingly need an agile management solution for new container setups housing sensitive applications and data and Satellite 6.2 provides scalability and offline support for all the cloud environments.

The latest version of Red Hat's leading in-memory data management technology, which can be used as a distributed cache, NoSQL database, or event broker, introduces enhancements to help organizations generate insights for continuous business optimization through real-time data analytics, contributing to greater agility and competitiveness. ... Cited as a leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: In-Memory Data Grids, Q3 2015, JBoss Data Grid combines high performance with enterprise-class scale and flexibility, offering customers a powerful tool that can deliver data at the moment it is needed for real-time analysis. ... With its speed, scale, and high availability, JBoss Data Grid is an ideal data platform to complement JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat's industry-leading open source Java EE 7 compliant application platform, to help organizations reduce or eliminate data bottlenecks.

Fastweb, a leading Italian telecommunications company, provides enterprise cloud-based ICT services to businesses that lack internal resources for independent development and support. As its adoption rate grew, Fastweb needed to improve automation and self-service capabilities to meet highly dynamic customer needs. To achieve an agile, flexible approach, Fastweb migrated to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. As a result, the company improved its competitive advantage and gained new customers.

If I were a CEO, the first question I'd ask anytime someone presented a new technology to me, would be a simple one: Why? As in Why this software or tool? What's its purpose? How is it going to improve the business? ... W]hat will be different for a business if it adopts containers? ... The most significant impact of containers is that they are going to simplify development and deployment overall. This means new software and new versions are available faster, and that there are fewer problems in making that software available. How do containers enable this to happen? They make the development process faster by breaking software into very small components called "microservices," which in turn can improve the quality of testing and reduce the complexity of integration. Containers make it easy to combine collections of related components during deployment and also separate the assembly of the application and what it needs from a direct connection with the operating system. This helps avoid mistakes during deployment, which also makes it easier to manage the transition to the cloud.