Friday Five — December 11, 2015

Submissions for the Red Hat Innovation Awards have been extended to December 18! If you're a Red Hat customer or partner and want to share your innovative IT project, make sure to submit by next Friday. 1 winner for each of the 6 submission categories will be selected by a panel of industry-expert judges, and an overall 2016 Red Hat Innovator of the Year will be selected through online voting and announced at the 2016 Red Hat Summit, June 28-July 1 in San Francisco. Winners receive 2 passes to the 2016 Red Hat Summit plus 3 nights of hotel accommodations.

The first wave of open source – Linux, JBoss and MySQL – have truly gone mainstream. 94% of the Fortune 500 are our customers, and 100% of large commercial banks, airlines and healthcare companies are using our software. When I joined Red Hat eight years ago, much of what I talked about revolved around whether open source was safe, secure and reliable – now, I think everybody knows it’s all of those things. So over those intervening eight years, we’ve clearly checked that off. The second major change is that CIOs are now looking at open source for where their innovation is going to come from. I talk to a lot of CIOs who basically say they’ve never really thought about it before but their purchasing and vendor management liked it so now they’ve got to understand it and develop an open-source strategy to keep ahead of competitors. That’s a fundamental change from where we were five years ago.

As the Internet has emerged as the way for user to research vehicles, Red Hat detailed Cox Automotive has digitized and moved its major existing brands online, making it easy to use familiar companies such as Autotrader, Manheim and Kelley Blue Book. However, the companies acknowledged that increased traffic and requests for IT service were slowing deployment and service times. Building on a continuing relationship with Red Hat that dates from 2005, Cox Automotive chose Red Hat CloudForms to manage its cloud infrastructure and deliver self-service access to IT resources for its portfolio of more than 25 brands. With Red Hat CloudForms' single unified interface, workers from all areas of the company serving various customer groups can view a shared IT environment, enabling easy access to self-service offerings for developers, enterprise architects and QA specialists. [Watch Cox's customer success video.]

Security is always a huge topic in IT but, with high-profile breach after high-profile breach, it has really hit the headlines this year. So, what do experts think the single biggest security threat of next year will be?... "I predict 2016 will see a dramatic rise in cyber extortion, such as ransomware, requiring payment to unlock important data and even threatening to publish sensitive corporate data if payment isn't made and CIOs should be factoring in a strategy now as to how they might deal with this." [Josh Bressers, Security Product Manager at Red Hat]

Red Hat is expanding its CloudForms management product as a combined on-premises and public cloud workload management system. It has added Microsoft's Azure to its hybrid management approach... "You can have a hybrid operation with OpenStack in the enterprise working with the Azure public cloud," said Fitzgerald [VP and general manager of Red Hat's Management business unit] in an interview. "We're doing for cloud what we did for operating system platforms. We commoditized the operating system. Now we're doing that for cloud management," he added, noting that few vendors have ventured into cross-cloud management.