Friday Five — May 6, 2016

Red Hat and Telefonica Business Solutions, a leading provider of a wide range of integrated communication solutions for the B2B market, announced an agreement establishing Red Hat Mobile Application Platform as the global reference platform for operators within the Telefonica Group to mobilize the business processes of its customers on their path to digital transformation. The Red Hat Mobile Application Platform has been used by Telefonica in some markets since 2012, completing Telefonica's Group Enterprise Managed Mobility proposition, as it provides users an open, agile, and collaborative approach to developing, integrating, and deploying mobile applications. A collaborative approach to mobile, enabled by open standards-based technologies such as the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, can help facilitate greater mobile adoption and maturity, as well as reduce both costs and time to market.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO at Red Hat, talks to CNBC about how Red Hat is competing in the OpenStack space and how block chains are making an impact on the tech world. Watch the video to hear more.

Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment with Red Hat solutions. As part of this project, Gulf Air has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data solution, Arabic Sentiment Analysis. Gulf Air has developed a sentiment analysis solution based on big data technologies that is capable of addressing social media posts in both Arabic and English for Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The solution is based on an open source Hadoop big data framework running across a server cluster in Gulf Air's private cloud environment and using Red Hat products... Today, Arabic Sentiment Analysis processes social media posts and provides easy-to-understand reports on what customers are saying about Gulf Air. Gulf Air's IT team also uses them as the basis for a wider analysis of the state of the market and actions taken by their competitors. Big data projects can come with a hefty bill, but Gulf Air believes that the Arabic Sentiment Analysis has been delivered cost-effectively, thanks in part to the company's enthusiasm for open source solutions.

In the current IT landscape, there is often a great disconnect between a company's development team and the end user of company products. This is where DevOps comes into play, and why DevOps has become so critical to business success. Certification providers have begun to offer DevOps training, and the latest to join the ranks is enterprise Linux titan Red Hat. Earlier this month, Red Hat announced a news architect-level credential, Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA): DevOps. The new credential can be attained by any Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) who passes five exams... What is DevOps? Is it a way of thinking? Is it a job title? Is it a culture? Is it just a way of doing things? In short, yes. DevOps encompasses many resources and disciplines, but according to Randy Russell, Director of Certification at Red Hat, it's a philosophy and set of tools. These tools are used for communication, collaboration, automation and integration, building a bridge between software developers and IT operations... Learning these DevOps practices and understanding how to implement them can make someone very valuable to any organization that could benefit from increased efficiency. Which is to say, really, any organization at all.

Last week, at the OpenStack Summit, we got to hear terrific stories from several companies, including Verizon, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and more. Red Hat punctuated those stories with some of its own innovation, including the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and the addition of a VNF (Virtualized Network Function) certification level for our partners... On the first day of the summit, Verizon announced completion of the industry's largest known NFV OpenStack cloud deployment, with the support of Red Hat, Dell and Big Switch Networks. The project has been in the works since last year and spans five of Verizon's U.S. data centers encompassing more than 50 racks, based on OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform... With open innovation, collaboration and leadership the sky's the limit, right? We at Red Hat believe so. Case in point: NASA's JPL has announced that it has built a private cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to process planetary exploration data, including all four Mars rovers... By the way, OpenStack has made its way into several other innovative and leading-edge labs: Oak Ridge National Lab and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.