Friday Five — September 4, 2015

How can you foster a culture of winning in your organization to boost your strategic plan? CEOs Derrick Hall of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Jim Whitehurst of software firm Red Hat faced this issue when putting their people on a faster track... Red Hat's software roots are in Linux, an operating system whose founder released its code to the public. "Our business model depends on collaboration and shared ideas," said Whitehurst. "What I need to do is create the space where (our people) can do their best work."

Being an OpenShift by Red Hat Partner allows partners to extend their reach to new customers in a new and easy way. The OpenShift by Red Hat Partner Program brings partners and Red Hat together to give partners the ability to work together in a way they haven't been able to before. Learn more about becoming an OpenShift Partner at www.openshift.com/partners.

To efficiently and effectively conquer mobile, organizations need to embrace agility across the whole app development cycle, including a focus on backend app integration and the technologies that support this. Enterprise-grade mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) and mobile application platform technologies have emerged to help enterprises close this gap between high app demand and their ability to deliver... In addition to adopting a platform approach for their mobile projects, IT teams can also boost their mobile efficiency if they take the following three steps. –Cathal McGloin, vice president, Mobile Platforms, Red Hat

DevOps isn't simply about encouraging developers and IT operations staff to collaborate. It's about increasing business agility. The hard truth around application development is that many organizations aren't agile enough to compete effectively in today's rapidly changing markets... Typically, these same organizations, due to their pre-existing development challenges, also are hesitant to adopt new approaches like DevOps. The beauty of DevOps, however, is that it's not an all-or-nothing practice. For IT professionals looking to see if DevOps is right for them or for organizations considering adopting the practice, here are three early DevOps-inspired steps that start to increase business agility.

Like Atlas shrugging the weight of the world from his shoulders, PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] provides both IT managers and developers with a sense of freedom they've never had before. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's cloud definitions, with PaaS "the consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure...but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment." In other words, PaaS allows IT administrators to do what they do best – provide reliable infrastructure in a secure, virtualized or physical environment. Meanwhile, PaaS provides developers with a self-service deployment infrastructure upon which to do what they do best – build applications to service the needs of the agency.