Friday Five — March 4, 2016

A decade and a half ago, the business model common to many open source companies–monetising the services provided around software–was "orthogonal" to the Microsoft business model, [Microsoft executive Mark] Hill says. "That's why we couldn't play well in an open source world," Hill says. "It just didn't fit in our business model–we all know that... So what has changed? Well the fundamental thing is, moving forward, Microsoft is less about being a company that licenses intellectual property and it's more about providing a service to customers. Everything changed with the cloud. Through the cloud we can provide customers with a service around traditional Microsoft software and we can provide a service around open source software... The changing attitude of Microsoft has made for some moments–such as the partnership with Red Hat–that few would have predicted even a handful of years ago. Although Windows Server and RHEL have been pitted against each other in the enterprise, Red Hat doesn't offer a "hyperscale" Azure-style cloud service, Hill says. "You know how to run Linux; we know how to run cloud. Customers use your stuff; they use our stuff," Hill says of the partnership. "Let's go jointly and make sure that customers can continue to have the best service and support from both of us, in such an integrated way that we'll even integrate our back-end support."

Getting IT to work smoothly is a challenge even when all the parts are in-house, but that's nothing compared with the widely dispersed Internet of Things. Enter Red Hat and Eurotech, which on Tuesday announced a new partnership aimed at simplifying the integration of all those IoT pieces. Italy-based Eurotech offers machine-to-machine platforms and other IoT products. Red Hat plans to combine its open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss middleware with Eurotech's Everyware Software Framework and Eurotech Everyware Cloud to create an end-to-end architecture for IoT. This will let enterprises integrate operational data from computing equipment at the edge of the network with cloud-based back-end services. Enterprise IoT needs computing capability at the edges of networks so companies don't have to ship masses of data to the cloud for real-time processing. Instead, data aggregation and transformation, plus data integration and routing, can take place close to the operational devices. Promising better security, manageability and application support for IoT systems, the two companies will offer data, device and embedded application management services.

The folks charged with developing and distributed enterprise applications have reached the point where they are identifying the drawbacks as well as the advantages of application containers. Given the right approach, a proponent of the technology argues, the advantages outweigh the hassles. The initial problem argues Rafael Benevides, a senior software developer at Red Hat, is that many new users continue to treat containers like virtual machines. In a blog post under the title, "Containers For Grownups," Benevides emphasized a key attribute of containers: they are disposable. Indeed, their inherent low overhead in terms of computing and storage resources is what makes micro-services so attractive as enterprise IT infrastructure is weighed down by torrents of data.

Line of business users see mobile as an enabling technology. IT sees mobile a transformative technology. This isn't a theory. These are the conclusions of Newbury, England-based research firm Vanson Bourne, which conducted two surveys in behalf of Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat, a provider of open source software solutions. Why is Red Hat talking about mobile? Red Hat got into the mobile platform business when the acquired FeedHenry around eighteen months ago. The points of view probably differ because IT has typically taken the lead on mobile projects up until now; however that's a trend that is expected to flip in the next two years. As this happens, line-of business (LOB) decision makers will focus on client-side development tools and technologies while relying on IT to support them with a range of modern app and integration technologies. Cathal McGloin, Red Hat's vice president, mobile platforms provided us with five things companies can do to set themselves up to win... At the end of the day, it's all about remembering that developing an app just the first step in the total life cycle of an app. A successful program will see a constant process of design, development, integration, deployment, measurement and management of their apps.

Even though more than three-quarters of senior corporate leadership at enterprises view IT security as "very" or "critically" important, 20 percent or less of most IT budgets are devoted to security and that situation is not expected to improve much this year. These were some of the findings of a survey of more than 400 IT personnel by TechValidate on behalf of open source enterprise software provider Red Hat. In fact, close to half of respondents said their company does not plan to increase their security budgets this year, with some even saying security budgets will be cut. "This is the Catch 22 around security. People are expected to do more with the same. ... The expectations continue to increase but the budgets do not," lamented said Josh Bressers, security strategist at Red Hat... Despite senior leadership concern about security, less than half of companies install security updates weekly or more frequently, according to the survey. And 13 percent wait to do updates quarterly, potentially leaving vulnerabilities in their software exposed for months.