Friday Five — June 19, 2015

Red Hat Summit is next week! IT developers, administrators, architects, and others from all over the globe will meet in Boston to increase their knowledge of leading open source solutions. There are over 170 sessions, labs, and customer panels to attend, as well as 8 keynotes from Red Hat and partner executives. Stay tuned for daily updates on the Red Hat Summit website and follow along on social media using the hashtag #RHSummit.

FICO came to the realization that, since its value was really contained in the intellectual property encapsulated in its software, it needed to transition to a more services-based model... FICO looked at the option of proprietary cloud solutions, but simply couldn't get the economics to work—it is, after all, looking to lower barriers to entry and hence pricing is critical. FICO quickly looked at OpenStack as its core infrastructure solution and began to assess vendors... Eventually FICO settled on a stack that included Red Hat as its OpenStack vendor, Red Hat's OpenShift as its Platform as a Service (PaaS) high-flying SolidFire for Tier 1 and Ceph for its Tier 2 and 3 needs... FICO is now broadening this initiative from customer-facing requirements to corporate data center ones. The performance, costs, and flexibility gains that it has seen are attractive and FICO wants to move forward.

We are excited to share that Red Hat was named to CRN's 2015 Virtualization 50 List for the second time in three years, recognized as a technology vendor to watch as more sections of the datacenter are virtualized, including server and storage virtualization, along with software-defined networking... In February, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5, featuring standardized virtualization features that enable IT organizations to service traditional virtualization workloads as well as highly flexible cloud-enabled workloads built on OpenStack... Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is deployed across major global verticals including media, healthcare, airline and electronics manufacturing.

Network Rail has transformed the way it operates by rolling out an agile, mobile-focused strategy that has allowed the organisation to do things it would not have previously thought possible... The firm has now gone so far as to roll out the use of Internet of Things-connected devices across its systems... The new, mobile way of working has also enabled Network Rail to allow business users to respond much more quickly to problems, such as severe weather affecting train routes and timetables."During last year when there was major disruption caused by storms and flooding, they needed to conceive, build and release a mobile application within hours," [Joe] Blake [of FeedHenry by Red Hat] told the Computing Summit audience. "Network Rail was able to build and roll out an application that enabled its end users to receive real-time information about the location of the most severe problems, to collect mission-critical data associated with high-priority issues... They can rollout that solution in a couple of hours, no code required." Ultimately, the deployment of a fully fledged enterprise mobility strategy has "massively improved Network Rail's ability to deal with crisis, focus their resources where they are needed most, and to keep and maintain the highest level of service possible."

To help companies get the most from their cloud adoption, the latest upgrade to Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Application Platform adds features across the lifecycle to make it far easier to bring Java apps—and Java skillsets—to the world of hybrid clouds... With JBoss EAP 6.4, Red Hat looks to help companies better leverage their use of cloud to cut costs and deployment times for all sorts of apps. In particular, it aims to help build, run and manage services for Java EE enterprise applications running just about anywhere—legacy, mobile, web, hybrid and cloud... Further, it promotes better DevOps by empowering better collaboration between the development and operations.