Friday Five — September 29, 2017

Red Hat chief Jim Whitehurst says "hybrid cloud," the combination of a company's on-premises computing with use of public cloud services such as AWS, is this year's fashion, given that technology is a fashion business. While Red Hat's sales of "enterprise Linux" from cloud partnerships, called the "cloud access program," is on a run rate of $200 million, said Whitehurst. That's about 10% of total Linux sales. But Whitehurst added, "I do think that part of our growth is driven by people recognizing that hybrid cloud is going to be the norm. You have to think about modernizing your on-premise infrastructure. That's been our value proposition, and that's helped us with RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux], which runs across deployment models." That means more people also buying Open Stack, on of the app-dev, or emerging, technologies.

Enterprises trust Red Hat precisely because it makes open source boring. Exciting and cool, on the other hand, often means getting paged in the middle of the night. Enterprise people generally don't like that kind of thing. Red Hat remains an anomaly–it makes money in open source. It has new revenue streams opening up. It is well positioned to keep doing the basics, but also now have a conversation with the C-suite about transformation.

How can art change how we interact with each other? Red Hat's newest Open Source Stories film examines what happens when an art museum invites everyone who enters its doors to not just admire art, but to participate in it.

Red Hat is dedicated to delivering choice for our customers, seen in our recently expanded relationship with Microsoft. Not only will end users be able to access Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Microsoft Azure and build and deploy .NET Core applications across Red Hat's open source portfolio, but they will also, for the first time, be able to run Windows Server containers alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux container workloads on Red Hat OpenShift. All of these choices help to open up new possibilities for datacenters running both Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux stacks.

Red Hat announced the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, an enterprise Linux platform optimized for running SAP software deployments. Building upon Red Hat's experience in delivering operating systems tailored for SAP software implementations, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions provides a smoother path for organizations seeking to integrate or merge their heterogeneous SAP software environments, offering a single, proven and standardized platform for big data analysis and management projects.