Friday Five — January 29, 2016

Open-source software vendor Red Hat had a mighty fine year in 2015... Red Hat shares rose 19.8%, full-year earnings increased by 17%, and free cash flows grew 20% larger. The question on Red Hat investors' minds right now is simple: Can the company meet or beat the fantastic performance of yesteryear?... Red Hat doesn't care too much whether the overall economy is going up, down, or sideways. When times are good, Red Hat enjoys boosted corporate IT budgets just as much as the next enterprise software vendor... In more difficult eras, on the other hand, Red Hat tends to do well even as its peers suffer. Tighter corporate belts give IT directors an excuse to start looking at cost savings and stable long-term solutions -- two areas where Red Hat's chosen business model often outperforms traditional enterprise software businesses... Otherwise, you should expect continued growth in sales, earnings, and cash flows either way. Red Hat's open-source software tools have already entered the mainstream in a big way. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a fully supported operating system on every mid-range and big iron server line I can think of, and with the addition of Microsoft's Windows Azure in the third quarter, every cloud-computing platform that matters.

A new incarnation of Red Hat's OpenShift Dedicated service for running containers will be available on Google Cloud Platform and could further Google's plans to create a genuine open source hybrid cloud... Google and Red Hat are touting several advantages of their collaboration, including the fact that OpenShift could complement and expand the use of Kubernetes, Google's container management and orchestration system. Kubernetes has fast become a standard-issue item on most cloud platforms with containers, and Red Hat is the No. 2 contributor to that project, behind Google... Another aspect of their collaboration: It supports Google's ongoing work on what amounts to an open source hybrid cloud environment built on container technology. The one piece missing from its stack has been a private cloud component -- open source or not. It seemed unlikely Google would ever build the item itself, so it makes sense for the company to turn to a third party with experience on that front.

Scott Herold, product management supervisor of virtualization technologies at Red Hat...said that Red Hat is no longer just an operating system, and the company has been transforming and modernizing throughout the market. Virtualization is a huge component to that modernization, and the company has embraced infrastructure, architecture challenges and containerization in the scope of some of the fields where the company is present... At the end of the day, Red Hat is focused on helping customers move their environments across multiple stacks, remove lock-in, and benefit from the variety of services that are readily available thanks to the features and power of modern infrastructures.

So what is DevOps, anyway? Check out Red Hat's new "insights" page focused on DevOps to better understand what DevOps is, what challenges it can help you solve, and how to implement DevOps in your organization. Red Hat also shares its vision for DevOps and where it's headed in the next few years.

Container technology has come a long way in a short period of time, but this could be the year that the containers begin to see production use in enterprises, according to Lars Herrmann, general manager of Red Hat's integrated solutions business unit... "It becomes a lot more easy for customers now that we have a lot more structure in the market around open standards with the Open Container Initiative and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on the various governance structures in open source," Herrmann explained. "So we actually do see that the early adoption is shifting. Customers want to go into production with these applications because they feel comfortable having the tools and being able to manage that." Containerization enables organizations to define what Herrmann noted is a better operational model. It's created a more ideal environment for existing and future workloads that provides greater transparency and consistency within organizations, he added. That's also attractive to enterprises and helping to drive further adoption.