Friday Five — September 18, 2015

Red Hat has been named a leader in "The Forrester Wave^TM: Mobile Infrastructure Services, Q3 2015" by Forrester Research, and received the highest score among all vendors for the strategy category—an assessment of each vendor in terms of its vision, customer satisfaction, speed to market, and alliances.

"Our customers want to hear our point of view on technology. But at the same time we want to make sure we stay very customer-focused... In order to resolve the conflict between leading and listening to our customers, I started talking about that challenge at employee meetings... I asked employees to try to build that challenge into what they did every day. Our customer support team then built a whole new system that can do proactive diagnostics. It looks at systems and sees where they have a problem. No senior manager, including me, had the idea to do that. I'd say I catalyzed the idea by saying that customer focus was important. Then our people went and did it. I didn't have to say, 'Let's build a product or form a customer council.' The organization just did it." —Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat

V3 has announced its Technology Awards 2015 shortlist, and online voting is now open. Red Hat is nominated for Best Virtualisation Product, Best Cloud Computing Provider, and Product of the Year. Voting will close at 5pm on Friday 9 October. The results will be announced at the V3 awards ceremony at The Montcalm London on Friday, 27 November and will appear in a special online report on the V3 site. Note: V3 will not count votes from firms voting for themselves, so share with others!

Avianca Holdings, the oldest and one of the largest airlines in Latin America, has won the prestigious 2015 Red Hat Innovator of the Year award. The company was recognized at Red Hat Summit 2015... The organization implemented Red Hat's middleware stack as its main integration layer across three data centers, supporting the airline's core communication systems. For Avianca Holdings, Red Hat's open source solutions are delivering ten times better performance than technology offered by other "traditional" software vendors they have tried. Red Hat's middleware solutions, including Red Hat JBoss Fuse, also provide Avianca Holdings with a scalable option that works well with the company's other IT solutions—well-positioning the airline for future technology growth and innovation.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing how sensors and controllers are made and connected. The devices are becoming more capable and more intelligent... These new capabilities and features also come with new security concerns. Consider one vital fact: anything that can connect to a network is a computer. Computers are flexible, general purpose devices that can be modified—for good or for evil. And any connection to the network is an entry point into the network. If you[r] network strategy is built around perimeter security, each IoT device is effectively punching a hole in your security... [But] there are several things you can do to build a secure IoT...