Red Hat Summit: Day 2 highlights

(Boughty Canton, VP Product & Programs, rhipe)

Day 2 at Red Hat Summit was a whirlwind of information. Here are my highlights:

1. Paul Cormier, Red Hat President of Products & Technologies, one of the favourites amongst the Red Hat community, kicked off the day with an enthusiastic review of how at the compute level Linux has gone from a complete outsider to one of really only 2 OS’s used in the enterprise today, a huge win for the open source community and model. He then suggested that by next year’s Summit the Networking and Storage components would also be firmly in the “win” column as well. What struck me most about his session, however, was a discussion about the value of the VM versus the App, with the conclusion being that it’s all about the App. With the emergence of Containers and micro-services, the ability to service Apps has been greatly enhanced, which is putting pressure on the VM market to innovate. From a Service Provider standpoint, the takeaway is that customers will likely need containers as part of their IT, and Service Providers would be well served by having offerings that support customers’ use of containers.
2. I also sat in a session focusing on using Public Clouds as part of a Hybrid Cloud strategy. What jumped out of the presentation was a cool stat. The rhipe community now represents 10% of the entire Red Hat Service Provider community.
3. Beyond Cormier’s session, there were very interesting sessions including one on simplifying the installation of Private Clouds, with a new unified installer that will be available shortly and could be useful to IaaS players looking to help their customers set up Private Clouds on their IaaS offering.
4. Also launched here at Summit was OpenShift 3 the latest iteration of PaaS, which is offered both as a service from Red Hat but can be offered by Service Providers as well. This market is hugely underserved in APAC and there’s a massive opportunity to get in early to service it. In terms of the product, there were some very cool announcements around how OpenShift 3 is based on container technology as well as Kubernetes, enabling much agile and cost effective PaaS.
5. Finally, I spent some time digging into the new Red Hat Mobile Platform (the evolution of the FeedHenry acquisition). Red Hat Mobile aims to be the platform for Mobile kind of like standards used in web servers today
   • It brings the client side together with the server side
   • Facilitates collaboration on launching mobile initiatives across enterprise
   • Repository of API's and services for discovery
   • Offers templates and code re-useCentralized control of security and access
   • Lifecycle management and reporting

Red Hat’s vision is to be the leading mobile application platform based on open source. In addition there was an interesting discussion about Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS), which will be necessary to help customer not only develop their apps, but also to deliver them.

We have been saying for a while that Service Providers are the trusted advisors of the future and mobile only makes that more true. We can’t wait to see what the rhipe community delivers.