Friday Five — August 7, 2015

Dualtec released the first public cloud offering based on OpenStack in the Brazilian market. "It's the foundation for creating new jobs in Iaas and PaaS that we're offering to our customers," said Dualtec's CEO, Lauro De Lauro. Dualtec experienced 25% reduction of hardware costs and dramatic gains in efficiency.

The reason that Samsung and Red Hat came together is that enterprise mobility is a complex system and it's challenging enterprises to extend their core, main systems out to mobile devices... We're a software company, and Samsung being a hardware company and a provider of devices and the OS on the devices completes that for many of our customers... So we really feel like together we offer enterprises a true enterprise mobility solution, where I have the software, the devices, the entirety of enterprise mobility covered in one alliance.

Employees don't just want the convenience that mobile provides. They want the advantages. The advantages of mobility actually lend themselves pretty well to work situations, and it doesn't end with accessibility. A mobile app that does nothing more than replicate a desktop computer screen is a waste of time. The lack of usability on a small display with a touch screen instead of a mouse will quickly be discarded in favor of the "old way". To fully realize the advantages of enterprise mobility, we must think carefully about the mobile experience being delivered.

With federal agencies facing a penny-pinching Congress, open source software is becoming a staple in the federal government, and that's opening up new market opportunities for engineers... "Open source can provide similar capabilities for a fraction of the cost of proprietary software," says David Egts, chief technologist for the US public sector at Red Hat. "We've seen customers save 90 percent compared to proprietary vendors"... The NSA found itself and other intelligence agencies spending a lot of money on secure versions of Unix. That's because it was a big engineering burden for engineers to make trusted versions of that operating system for only a few customers... So what the NSA did was create an open source project based on Linux that met its security needs. That operating system became SELinux. Red Hat was able to incorporate the fruits of that project into its version of Linux. "It allowed us to provide a more secure baseline for our customers so today every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we ship has SELinux enabled."

Jim [Whitehurst] definitely knows how to build a successful career — and just as importantly, what smart leaders look for as they develop and promote talented employees... "Authenticity is the real key to leadership at any level, especially the senior level. The goal is to be authentic and learn to work within the framework of your personality to get people to follow your lead. Be yourself and leverage your strengths. Don't try to act like someone else... People like, respect, and follow real people. Be yourself and learn how to get people to do what you want them to do — as yourself."