Friday Five — September 25, 2015

Red Hat continues to accelerate its growth thanks to an evolving mix of platform and infrastructure technology revolving around Linux and the cloud. Red Hat announced its second quarter fiscal 2016 financial results on September 21, once again exceeding expectations. For the quarter, Red Hat reported revenue of $504 million, for a 13 percent year-over-year gain... During the earnings call, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst was repeatedly asked about the revenue prospects for OpenStack... Whitehurst said he is starting to see a lot more production applications start to move to the OpenStack cloud. He cautioned however that it's still largely the early adopters moving to OpenStack in production and it isn't quite mainstream, yet.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat president & CEO, discusses where the company is finding growth, and taking share in the cloud space.

Containers -- and other lightweight approaches to deliver services -- are changing the shape of operating systems, applications, and the tools to manage them. [InfoWorld's] Bossie winners in data center and cloud are leading the charge. #16. GlusterFS is a distributed file system. Gluster aggregates various storage servers into one large parallel network file system... In an era of commoditized hardware, commoditized computing, and increased performance and latency requirements, buying a big, fat expensive EMC SAN and hoping it fits all of your needs (it won't) is no longer your sole viable option. GlusterFS was acquired by Red Hat in 2011.

If the web was the disruptive technology of 20 years ago, mobile is the equivalent today. But while novelty means mobile is ripe for innovation, it also means that mobile is still chaotic and looking for definition... "Because mobile crept into the enterprise, everybody just did their own thing and there were no standards. In the same way, when the web came out, there were no standard products for, say, web servers and everybody built their own," [says Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms at Red Hat]. According to McGloin, this problem can be solved by what he and Red Hat call mobile back-end-as-a-service (MBaas)... "[T]he role...of mobile-back-end as a service [is to provide] a set of features that have been solved that make it easier for client-side developers to build on."

In his new book, The Open Organization, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst makes the case for catalytic leadership. Managers direct. Leaders inspire and enable. Catalytic leaders build on inspiring and enabling with their attention to earning the right to lead and encouraging without judging. Whitehurst's examples are drawn from organizations like Whole Foods, Zappos, Pixar, Starbucks, W.L. Gore and, of course, Red Hat. If you map Red Hat's culture across dimensions of behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and the environment you find mostly balance with spikes on identity, decisions, and learning.