Friday Five — May 29, 2015

In a constantly accelerating landscape, how can companies stay competitive with limited resources? Could a cultural transformation hold the key to enhancing business performance? From his years of leading vertical organizations to managing the innovative open source tech company Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst has experienced the spectrum of corporate structures and understands why open organizations based on transparency, participation, and community are revolutionizing business. In this webinar, Jim will share candid advice about structuring and leading an open organization and discuss how aspects of its model can be incorporated into corporations of any size to fuel passion, engagement, and exceptional performance.

In The Open Organization, Jim Whitehurst reports on what it's like to run the world's biggest open source software company, Red Hat. This affable, entertaining and eye-opening book sees Whitehurst reporting on the interviews, company meetings, the challenges and mistakes he has made and the result, I believe, will become a textbook for managing modern businesses, even those without a strong technology component... Refreshingly, Whitehurst doesn't present his journey as having been without challenges or detours. In fact, The Open Organization is full of droll tales where the CEO is often the person in the wrong.

While Forrester [Research], and they're far from the only ones, worry about just how ready OpenStack is for the business, Best Buy, BMW, EBay, and WalMart are already using OpenStack for mission-critical work... OpenStack is now backed by more than 200 vendors, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, RackSpace Red Hat, and VMware. Is there any enterprise out there which doesn't have a working relationship with at least of one of these companies? This is making OpenStack deployment easier. If your company doesn't have the talent it needs to do it in-house, Canonical, Red Hat, and Mirantis, to name but three of the leading OpenStack deployment firms, are all ready to jump in and help you get up and running. In short, you can pay cash today and have a working OpenStack cloud tomorrow.

Arun Gupta, director of technical marketing and developer advocacy at Red Hat, recently posted a set of numbers crunched from Docker's GitHub data, apparently generated by the gitdm utility, revealing the corporate affiliations of the major contributors to Docker. Not surprisingly, the single biggest named contributor is Docker, which has the most lines changed and the most number of change sets. In second place is Red Hat... It's a reflection of the company's reorientation of its Linux platform away from generic enterprise infrastructure and toward containers, with at least 42 developers at Red Hat working on container-related projects. A similar search on the Docker-related Kubernetes project revealed statistics that showed Red Had devoting about as many developers to that project as well.

To look into Red Hat's Linux crystal ball, just gaze at Fedora, its community-driven Linux distribution. With the general release of Fedora 22, you can see exactly where Red Hat plans on taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the future. Under the Fedora.next program, Fedora comes in three platforms: Workstation, Cloud, and Server. Underneath each, Fedora provides a set of foundational packages, including the Linux kernel, RPM, systemd, and Fedora's installation program Anaconda... To no one's surprise, Fedora 22 Cloud's most significant features are all about containers all the time. The Fedora 22 Atomic Host images now include the Atomic command, a coherent entry point for managing hosts and containers.