Friday Five — January 15, 2016

Argentina's "Best Employers" survey, published by business magazine Apertura, selected Red Hat Argentina as the top choice in the "Less than 200 employees" category for human resources policies. Among the various aspects that were evaluated for the selection of companies were the ability to develop a professional career, remuneration, work environment, schedule, qualifications and training. In 2014, the headcount for Red Hat's Argentina office went up 30%, and now its 80+ employees are moving to a new–and 50% bigger–office in early 2016.

Software cost is one of the big drivers behind open source adoption, but it is not the only driver. Cost aside, open source seems to offer some organisations a superior technical choice... Global ticket distribution company Amadeus serves almost 700 million passengers. It took more than half a billion travel reservations in 2014. The company needed a system with extremely low response times and high consistency to support its new Amadeus Cloud Services. It selected a suite of open source technologies, including Red Hat's OpenShift platform, with Docker containers and Kubernetes orchestration, together with the Couchbase NoSQL database, to build a standardised and unified deployment process across a global distributed environment... For Defayet [director of R&D for airline IT at Amadeus], using open source technology means Amadeus is not locked in to any one supplier's technology stack. "We have the [ability] to master the entire software stack," he says, adding that by contributing actively to the open source community, Amadeus has an opportunity to influence the product roadmap.

"One of my favorite Best of Breed stocks isn't resting on a huge lead within its market, it's expanding into other markets and cross-selling new products. While competitors will see lower sales on any economic pullback, [Red Hat] may actually increase sales as customers entrench their business with one provider that can provide bundled discount offers... Subscription revenue is growing at an 18% annual rate and the company could be moving into a turning point. Red Hat is aggressively positioning in enterprise cloud services and using the growing adoption of open source to upsell customers into other products. Deals containing both an infrastructure-related contract and an application development or emerging tech service have grown at a 26% annualized rate over the two years through 2015, accounting for 68% of business last year... What's even more surprising about Red Hat's strong double-digit annual growth is that it's not a new tech upstart. The company is one of the Founding Fathers of the internet age, opening its doors in 1993, but still books growth that would make other tech heavyweights jealous." –StreetAuthority

"Our age requires a new management paradigm, one that taps the passion and intelligence of a workforce motivated by something other than a paycheck. I believe the open organization is that model... Open source communities demonstrate participatory organizational principles in their purest form. Red Hat has been incredibly lucky to work with so many of these communities–which are essentially fertile and fascinating petri dishes of experimentation with cutting-edge management and leadership ideas. We learn from them every day. And we'll continue looking to them for guidance on our journey, because they represent our greatest hope for making workplaces more inclusive, more meritocratic, and more humane. These communities are constantly innovating by questioning tradition, and that's precisely what any organization must do if it wants to remain viable today." –Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer, Red Hat

Red Hat on Tuesday released a reworked Ansible 2.0 that offers improved exception handling and updated modules for Docker, OpenStack and Windows. "This release has been a long time coming," said Tim Cramer, senior director of Ansible Engineering at Red Hat. "We basically have rewritten a bunch of the core engine. There was a lot of technical debt involved in cleaning up Ansible and having it catch up to what people were using it for so it's more maintainable and expandable." Red Hat acquired the automation and configuration framework for an estimated $150 million in October... One of the most notable improvements is that software now relieves some of the constraints on how updates can be rolled out across a system.