In the four years since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 redefined the operating system, the IT world has changed dramatically and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has evolved with it. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta once again sets a bar for how the operating system can enable IT innovation. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta features hundreds of improvements and dozens of new features, several key capabilities are designed to help the platform drive digital transformation and fuel hybrid cloud adoption without disrupting existing production systems.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, the latest version of Red Hat's massively-scalable, cloud-native apps-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, is based on the OpenStack "Rocky" community release. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14 is designed to simplify cloud-native application adoption and containers on bare metal, and to enhance agility and innovation while reducing infrastructure complexity.

The new Red Hat virtual central office solution provides a blueprint for modernizing telecommunications operations at the network edge via an open, software-defined infrastructure platform. Service providers can readily slot Red Hat's portfolio of open standards-based products as well as technologies from our robust ecosystem of certified partners into this pluggable framework.

Red Hat is taking an important step toward helping customers build event-driven applications with the introduction of Red Hat AMQ Streams, a high-performance data streaming capability based on the Apache Kafka open source project. AMQ Streams takes an innovative approach by integrating the features of Kafka into the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. We believe this is an important and unique distinction. As more of the software world has converged on Kubernetes as the standard platform for building cloud-native applications, it is increasingly important to be able to run the communication infrastructure on the same platform.

On October 28, IBM announced its intent to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. This marked the largest software acquisition ever. Prior to announcement, I caught up with Red Hat Chief Information Officer Mike Kelly, who offered thoughts on the steps his team had undertaken to continue to improve Red Hat's product (using a Red Hat-on-Red Hat program), to advise technology executives at various stages of leveraging open source technology, and in improving the overall operation. Clearly these are the sorts of improvements that helped make the company attractive to IBM.