Friday Five — July 24, 2015

Current generations of IT professionals are experiencing a growing disconnect between enterprise IT and personal IT. Enterprise IT remains reliable, but in most cases slow to procure, complex to use, and overall frustrating. Personal IT is instantaneously available, easy-to-understand and blazing fast at executing the tasks that enterprise IT is supposed to execute... A key enabler for a frictionless IT is a smooth user experience... However, very few organisations in the world look at these aspects from a holistic standpoint and take a user-centric approach... The primary reason why some public cloud offerings become overnight successes at a planetary scale is their intuitive user interface. Personal IT has made people grow accustomed to intuitiveness, and the demand for it is supported by the broad market offering. There are no second chances for app that are not frictionless.

Global travel technology provider Amadeus is building its own highly available, self-service, automated cloud platform — Amadeus Cloud Services — on OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat's private cloud application platform... Amadeus' IT teams assessed various open source solutions for infrastructure architecture and design and application containers, ultimately selecting OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat to begin creating and running a private cloud-based application designed to meet specific customer demands. The scaling and automation capabilities of OpenShift Enterprise let Amadeus do so, while allowing the company to maintain its platform's original structure. Amadeus then selected OpenShift to build the Amadeus Cloud Services solution, which they plan to gradually roll out to serve Amadeus' travel industry customers.

At the recent Red Hat Summit in Boston, Executive Vice President Paul Cormier declared victory for open source. "Linux has won in the data center," he proclaimed to an applauding crowd, acknowledging that along with Windows, Linux is one of two major operating systems in enterprise data centers today. Now, however, there is an even bigger challenge: "Our job is to take open source all the way across the infrastructure and application development [stack]"... For some Red Hat customers, the value of open source technologies is immeasurable. Credit scoring company FICO was mostly a VMware shop three years ago, but when it decided to embrace a scale-out private-cloud infrastructure, it was one of the first to adopt OpenShift and then OpenStack. Nick Gerasimatos, director of engineering and cloud services at FICO, says using open source has allowed the company to not only reduce software licensing costs, but perhaps more importantly, participate in the evolution of the OpenShift and OpenStack code to ensure it fits FICO's needs. "In the end, open source is going to win."

Open source technology provider Red Hat argues enterprises are being "deliberate" when it comes to implementing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. The view comes on the back of a recent survey, conducted by TechValidate, which showed only 12% of respondents are currently in the process of rolling out an IoT solution. Yet Red Hat argues this is the natural path for enterprises, generally watchful and glacial over new technology trends. "Far from being a negative, this mirrors the typical enterprise adoption of new technologies, with project roll outs often taking far longer than they may in smaller organisations or in the consumer world. This timeline can sometimes be sped up with the right technology."

While much attention in recent months has been put on Linux containers (and for good reason), today, cloud native applications and services are taking the stage, with the Linux Foundation"s announcement of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Containers are strongly associated with this new paradigm of application development and delivery, and Red Hat is pleased to be a founding member of the Foundation, alongside the Linux Foundation and several other industry leaders, including Google, to help advance standards for emerging open source technologies. The foundation will seek to prevent the technology fragmentation that can impede customer adoption and stymie effective industry collaboration.