Friday Five — May 20, 2016

Red Hat is built around an open source vision whether it is for Linux or for the cloud. It has cloud solutions that are complementary to its Linux solutions. Even though this company has crossed the $2 billion revenue milestone in its latest fiscal year, I think that it has more than enough open source opportunities to keep its growth rate stable at the 20% level for a few more years. I also think that there is a significant margin opportunity that will ultimately be realized. This is not quite another cloud story, although the emergence of the cloud is a significant pillar of this company's growth opportunities. It is a far more stable way for investors to get some of the growth of the cloud and some of the growth of open source within the context of a reasonably profitable business model, that is not overly reliant on stock-based comp. to attain profitability.

The latest edition of Red Hat's bleeding-edge Linux distribution, Fedora 24, is now available in beta, with the majority of the changes addressing how cloud applications are hosted and managed. Ever since Fedora was split into three subeditions last year -- Cloud, Server, and Workstation -- it's become a proving ground both for cloud technologies and new strategies to manage Fedora itself. Fedora 24 continues that trend. It's now the foundation for Fedora Atomic Host, a version built using Red Hat's Project Atomic methodology and released apart from conventional releases. With Atomic Host, the OS and its apps are packaged as a series of immutable containers so that upgrades and rollback are as painless and nondestructive as possible.

One of the key things I [Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO] learned is that in [a business crisis] type of situation, your goal should not be to comfort or make people feel better, but to be open and honest. Tell people what it's like and allow them to make the decisions that work best for them. A lot of leaders want to show a ray of optimism, but all you do is shade the truth. Be honest and say, "This is what it is and this is what we're going to do about it." The other lesson I've learned is that once you've made the decision you believe in, you have to stick by it, because you're making these changes for the good of the whole. This helps give you the fortitude to do these painful things if you have the clear vision of where you're going. I think one of the things leaders have trouble with in difficult times is that they know they have this problem, but they're not going to change their team because it's too painful... It's important to have the fortitude to say, "I'm going to do this, and it starts with my team."

Caixa Seguradora, an insurance solutions provider, needed to build an efficient IT environment to meet compliance standards and support its global operations–consisting of seven companies and two datacenters serving approximately 10 million customers throughout Brazil. Using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Satellite, the company developed a new virtualization platform that improved resource management, efficiency, and reliability. As a result, Caixa Seguradora lowered IT costs and can better prepare to adopt new processes and technologies, such as business intelligence and big data.

Red Hat announced that OpenShift Commons has surpassed 200 members across more than 40 countries and key industries, including private and public cloud service providers and customers and partners in the banking and finance, higher education, and public sector. OpenShift Commons is an open source community spanning multiple projects where customers, partners, and contributors collaborate and share best practices about adopting container platforms at scale. The OpenShift Commons community is designed to bridge multiple upstream projects that are incorporated into OpenShift Origin including Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, Project Atomic and more. Unlike other vendor-sponsored software communities, OpenShift Commons is dedicated to combining input and giving users accessibility to best practices, operations knowledge, and briefings on special topics.