Friday Five — February 24, 2017

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Red Hat announced they are working together to accelerate the deployment of network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions based on fully open, production-ready, standards-based infrastructures. Consistent with HPE's multi-cloud, multi-stack strategy and broader open source software commitment, HPE is collaborating with Red Hat to accelerate OpenStack adoption by CSPs worldwide, offering customers increased choice through multiple commercial distributions, including both HPE Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. With these new offerings, HPE and Red Hat are building upon an existing alliance, focused on helping customers overcome the inflexibility and high costs created by data center, application and IT sprawl by shifting resources to business innovation.

As part of Red Hat's commitment to delivering open technologies across many computing architectures,
Red Hat has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture, at the Platinum level. While we (Red Hat) already do build and support open technologies for the POWER architecture, the OpenPOWER Foundation is committed to an open, community-driven technology-creation process - something that we feel is critical to the continued growth of open collaboration around POWER. As a participant in the OpenPOWER community and a member of the Board of Directors, we plan to focus on helping to create open source software for POWER-based architectures, offering more choice, control and flexibility to developers working on hyperscale and cloud-based data centers. We feel that open standards, like those being utilized by OpenPOWER, are critical to enterprise IT innovation, offering a common set of guidelines for the integration, implementation and security of new technologies.

RightScale's 2017 edition of its annual State of the Cloud Report is a nice chance to look back and see how far [the cloud has] come. RightScale produces the reports every year, and this year the company surveyed over 1,000 technology professionals about a wide range of factors, all relating to their adoption of cloud computing. So what does this year's report tell us about cloud adoption? Hybrid cloud is the preferred enterprise strategy, but private cloud adoption fell. While this fall of private cloud adoption could be taken to suggest that organizations are settling on a single public cloud vendor, that does not seem to be the case—85% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, up from 82% in 2016. Cloud seems to have moved beyond the tipping point and is now the default—95% of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure as a service.

In 2015, Red Hat conducted a survey around the Internet-of-Things (IoT) at the enterprise level and found that the best way to describe enterprise IoT was "deliberate." Fast-forward to today, and the results from a January 2017 Red Hat survey around enterprise IoT indicate that the deliberate descriptor is still quite accurate. Conducted by TechValidate on behalf of Red Hat, and polling more than 200 IT decision makers and professionals from a wide variety of large organizations, the survey shows that while interest in IoT is picking up, actual roll-outs are being approached with the common enterprise IT theme of "steady deliberation." In terms of the technology mix, survey respondents are overwhelmingly (89 percent) turning to open source for their IoT projects. Respondents also called out middleware (22 percent) as the most important part of the software mix in their implementations, showing just how critical these technologies are to integrating IoT with the broader business.

The Red Hat JBoss Middleware team is pleased to announce the latest update to the Red Hat JBoss Fuse-based integration service on Red Hat OpenShift. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-based SaaS systems, and new data streams, organizations can face increasing pressure to more quickly deliver innovative new services. Rather, integration should be part of an organization's overall application strategy where it can be ingrained in the business process flows for greater agility. Such an agile integration approach requires three foundational capabilities: distributed integration, containers, and an API-based architecture. The release of Red Hat JBoss Fuse 6.3 integration services for Red Hat OpenShift is aimed at enhancing these capabilities and simplifying the transition for customers looking to adopt containerized infrastructure for existing applications and workloads.