Friday Five — July 31, 2015

Red Hat has announced the general availability of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 6.7, the latest update to RHEL 6 platform. While individuals, governments and organizations continue to lose billions of dollars in damages due to security holes in Microsoft Windows, Linux remains a secure choice for these customers. No software is bug free, but unlike Mac OS X or Windows, when the security holes are discovered they are patched in matter of hours or days and not months or years... One of the biggest benefits that 6.7 brings to customer is compatibility with Red Hat Access Insights. It's a new hosted service by the company to help customers proactively identify and fix issues that could affect their businesses.

To be effective, the primary thing a CEO needs to do is make a connection with the people who are working for them. Rather than thinking about driving performance, it's all about how do you create the context in which your people can perform their best. Doing that requires building an emotional connection, a mission of company, a reason for the company to be successful. That's human interaction... You really have to think even harder about how do I get more connected with your people. How do I make sure that everybody is connected back to the mission of the company and what you're trying to accomplish.

Time to update those resumes. Mobile developers looking to land a new job have chosen their career path wisely, suggests a new study from Red Hat. Fifty percent of the 112 of IT decision makers polled by TechValidate for Red Hat plan to take on new hires to support their mobile IT initiatives. Of those, 32 percent are seeking front-end development experts while 27 percent are on the lookout for back-end integration specialists... Fittingly, 15 percent of organizations are seeking candidates with DevOps skills for a quick turnaround on their mobile projects.

Businesses often proclaim themselves as being transparent, but what characteristics make for a truly open organization? In the recent book, "The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance", Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst reveals how his open-source enterprise software company has cultivated this kind of culture. When CIOs and other leaders embrace participation at all levels while minimizing hierarchies, he writes, employees grasp the full meaning of their roles and are empowered to influence change. "In order to drive engagement and collaboration to the roots of an organization, you need to get people involved in the decision-making process."

Buyers are not just passively consuming marketing messages–they are commenting, creating their own blogs and responding in ways that marketers cannot control. While this creates challenges for marketers who once had the stage to themselves, it also creates unique opportunities, says Jackie Yeaney, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing for open source software company Red Hat. "If you pay attention... they are telling us what they want, what's relevant to them (and) how you can better engage with them...it's a lot of work to use...marketing technology (martech) to capture the data, but that's the name of the game." In this episode of Moneyball for Marketing, Jackie discusses how Red Hat is managing this transition across its global marketing programs, how it listens to audience feedback to determine marketing focus areas and how it is managing change internally.