Friday Five — August 12, 2016

Red Hat announced that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the "Visionaries" quadrant of the 2016 x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure Magic Quadrant. Gartner's Magic Quadrants are based on rigorous analysis of a vendor's completeness of vision and ability to execute. According to Gartner, "About 80% of x86 server workloads are virtualized, but virtualization technologies are becoming more lightweight, supporting more workloads and agile development. Price, modernization and specific use cases are driving enterprises to deploy different, and often multiple, virtualization technologies." Gartner went on to say, "Red Hat has entered the Visionaries quadrant, primarily due to a strong tie between KVM adoption and OpenStack, as well as an increase in OpenStack adoption and integration."

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been named a "Visionary" in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure. We believe that our positioning highlights Red Hat's ability to deliver an integrated virtualization solution that is tightly coupled with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and complementary cloud technologies including Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Our vision is to enable IT organizations to deploy solutions that help drive innovation throughout the entire stack, from traditional virtualization to cloud-enabled workloads. As Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is built on the KVM hypervisor, we are excited about our continued investments in the KVM hypervisor ecosystem and our contributions in the community, including the great work done by our engineers. Red Hat authors 60% of the code accepted into the KVM hypervisor, and employs many of the maintainers and core contributors. These contributions into the core enablement technology helped fuel Red Hat's growth in both Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat OpenStack Platform during our most recently completed fiscal year.

[W]hat you may not realize is that the insane popularity of containers, a tech used by computer programmers, promises to completely change the multi-trillion-dollar enterprise software market, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst tells us. "It is a whole shift in how applications are built, deployed, managed," Whitehurst says. "It's going to create winners and losers." Containers allow programmers to set up management features, like security and network settings, that travel with the app as it runs on different computers or in the cloud. That means that programmers can write code on their laptops, test it there, and when they publish it to servers, it works the same as it did on the laptops. They don't have to spend hours debugging and fixing that stuff. "It's like the iPhone App Store for enterprise," Whitehurst says, meaning containers are as significant to enterprise app developers as the app store is to consumer app developers. "It makes it dramatically easier to develop technology. It literally can double the productivity of your development staff."

In technology, we often seem seduced into chasing the latest shiny object. Cloud! Containers! Orchestration! IoT! Big Data! These are all well and good and can not only deliver significant value but can enable new classes of applications and revenue streams over time. That said, it's worthwhile for IT decision-makers to pause to think about practical ways to increase the value of existing investments while simultaneously planning for exciting future opportunities. This series of posts will consider some of the ways that you can increase the value of your virtualization investment and, by so doing, directly address common pressing concerns and requirements. These specific concerns come up repeatedly in our discussions with IT leaders, both in one-on-one conversations and through focus groups and other research. ... Modernizing virtualization can take a variety of forms. For our purposes here, I'm going to focus on three pragmatic areas of value. I'm going to deliberately avoid terms such as "private clouds" that can carry baggage not relevant to this discussions. This post will introduce the three areas. Subsequent posts will flesh them out further and touch on some of the Red Hat technologies and products that can address them.

Matsui Securities' next-generation NetStock Smart trading environment began operating in May 2015. It's focused on simplicity and intuitive ease of use in order to cater to a wide range of customers, and also provides real-time data features to support trading. Matsui Securities adopted the Red Hat JBoss Data Grid in-memory data grid in order to provide high user convenience and build an easy-to-use environment.