As AI continues to shape cloud strategies, UK IT leaders are prioritising investments in cloud technology, but they are also facing significant challenges. A recent survey conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Red Hat polled 609 IT managers across the UK and other major markets. More than 80% of IT managers report an urgent AI… Read more »
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Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, and Oracle, have expanded their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will… Read more »
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Red Hat has confirmed it has entered into a definitive agreement to 3scale, a provider of API management technology, reports Telecoms.com.
The two companies have been in partnership since early 2015 to create platform for API-based application development, though the acquisition is set to close in June 2016. 3scale currently provides developers with the tools to create, manage and scale APIs, and also recently introduced a containerized version of their API Gateway for Red Hat OpenShift. The tool enabls users to create applications with microservices distributed across diverse, hybrid environments. Upon completion of the transaction, the team commented on its blog it will open source the code almost immediately.
Red Hat claim the API management platform offered by 3scale complements various aspects of its portfolio well, most notably the JBoss Middleware portfolio, and also the elastic cloud environment provided by OpenShift. Although the company has not confirmed whether the 3scale brand will continue in the long-term, it does have a technology roadmap based on current customer requirements and the competitive landscape, which will be honoured.
“3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published,” said Craig Muzilla, SVP of Application Platforms Business at Red Hat.
Ret Hat hope the acquisition will prove to be a differentiator in a crowded market, as it believes API management offerings could be the make-or-break factor in a number of new customer acquisitions who are looking at integration solutions. This coupled with API management offerings becoming a more important requirement in cloud application platforms, is the basis of the transaction. Acquiring 3scale enables Red Hat to address these evolving requirements quickly, as it continues the wider industry trend of acquire to innovate over organic growth.
Alongside the acquisition, the team also announced its quarterly results which demonstrated healthy growth. Q1 revenue was reported at $568 million, up 18% year-on-year, with subscription revenues at $502 million, also up 18% year-on-year. Subscription revenue from Application Development-related and other emerging technologies offerings for the quarter was $98 million, an increase of 39%.
“Digital transformation and cloud computing are changing the way companies compete in virtually every industry today,” said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. “Organizations that rapidly embrace agile IT technology are succeeding as industry innovation accelerates around them. Our open source-based technologies are helping customers capture the business benefits associated with this rapid rate of change.”
In terms of the outlook for the remainder of 2016 and beyond, containers were a technology which have been prioritized for the business.
“We actually see containers as a great opportunity for us to continue to differentiate around, a, kernel space and user space being consistent,” said Whitehurst in the company’s earnings call. “So having the same host and technology in the container itself. And then secondly just ability to lifecycle manages against that.
“So containers overall are good for Linux because it helps it grow overall share versus Windows. And then within that we think we have a definitely differentiated position given our position in the OS. So that’s why we can see continue double digit growth in general in the OS category which includes containers.”
Red Hat has launched general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, leaning on wider DevOps trends within the industry.
The company claims the new offerings will assist enterprise organizations in bridging the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing, and successfully implement a DevOps business model.
“Everyone is now aware that Uber doesn’t own a car or Facebook doesn’t generate its own content, this is nothing new, but it does highlight the digital disruption which is taking place in the industry,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack at Red Hat. “These disruptions are impacting decisions on infrastructure within the organization, but also what kind of development methodology gets adopted. Customers are demanding an agile infrastructure and a Devops model to ensure they can reduce time to market and accelerate innovation within their own organization.
“When you generally look at the CIO agenda, the need to be more responsive to business needs is a priority within almost every organization by default. Given that they are viewing DevOps as a means to facilitate the change in thinking and culture, DevOps is here now and it’s not a fad which the industry has grabbed onto.
“Even internally, we have been aggressive in embracing DevOps. Our oldest business is Enterprise Linux and security updates is an area which of key value to our customers. Heartbleed was a huge issue for our customers 12 months ago, and since we are following the DevOps methodology, we were not only able to provide a patch, but we also pushed out a tool which customers can use to see if they are now compliant. None of this would have been possible without DevOps, so we are seeing the benefits internally as well.”
Red Hat is currently pinning its ambitions on the growth of OpenStack and the belief it will become the choice operating system for cloud infrastructure and the data centres of the future. The company backed the growth of Linux in a similar fashion, effectively riding the wave to its $2 billion annual sales, and is now placing the same bet on OpenStack, and its adoption throughout the industry.
The launch is based on OpenStack Kilo, the release which came out last year, combining the Red Hat cloud, DevOps and container offerings on a single cloud suite, within a private cloud environment. Keeping on the theme of ‘openness’, the tools will also be available as individual products should customers want to work with other offerings also.
Building on another industry trend, Red Hat has also prioritized containers as a technology for its service offering.
“Containers are probably the most attractive technology we at Red Hat have seen in years. Every large customer we have wants to have a conversation around containers,” said Balakrishnan. “We’re including OpenShift in the cloud suite, which is a service offering which was designed from the ground up on Docker (for container image) and Kubernetes (for orchestration layer). We are excited about the fact that we are one of the first in the industry to be bringing container technology to mainstream.
“Containers are one of the biggest priority areas for us as a company, so much so that we include container technology in our Enterprise Linux offering. It’s pervasive both in our technology as well as in our customer minds.”
Red Hat demonstrated healthy growth in its quarterly earnings, with CEO James Whitehurst attributing the success to the growing hybrid cloud market.
The company reported Q4 revenues at $544 million and total revenues for the year at $2.05 billion, both an increase of 21% on the previous year (constant currency). It now claims to be the only open-source company to have breached the $2 billion milestone.
“Our results reflect the fact that enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies, and they are turning to Red Hat as their strategic partner as they do so,” said Whitehurst. “First, the fourth quarter marked our 56th consecutive quarter of revenue growth which contributed to Red Hat’s first year of crossing the $2 billion in total revenue milestone.”
While public cloud has been dominating the headlines in recent weeks, the Red Hat team remain positive that the hybrid cloud market will ultimately deliver on expectations. “Public cloud has been a great resource for us to reach new customers, including small and medium-sized businesses,” said Whitehurst.
“During meetings Frank (Frank Calderoni, CFO) and I have hosted over the quarter, investors have asked whether the public cloud is a positive driver for Red Hat. We firmly believe that it will be a hybrid cloud world, where applications will run across four – all four footprints; physical, virtual, public cloud, and private cloud.
“Our revenue from private IaaS, PaaS and cloud management technologies is growing at nearly twice as fast as our public cloud revenue did when it was at the same size.”
Although it is unsurprising that Red Hat strongly backs the hybrid cloud model, security and data protection concerns in the industry add weight to the position. Despite progress made in the delivery and management of public cloud platforms, recent research has shown that enterprise decision makers are still concerned about the level of security offered in public cloud, but also where the data will reside geographically. Both concerns are seemingly driven hybrid cloud adoption, giving enterprise the full control on how and where company critical data is stored.
Over the last 12 months, Ret Hat has also confirmed a number of partnerships with major players in the public cloud space to increase its footprint. Last year, a partnership was announced with Microsoft where it became a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, enabling customers to run their Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads on Microsoft Azure. In addition the Certified Cloud and Service Provider platform also has relationships with Google and Rackspace. Red Hat claims that these relationships have resulted in more than $100 million revenue, a 90% increase year-on-year.
“In Q4, we further expanded our technology offerings that can be consumed in the cloud. For instance, RHEL on-demand is activated on Azure in February,” said Whitehurst. “OpenShift, our PaaS solution, and our storage technology will be added to the Google cloud. And RHEL OpenStack platform is now available at RackSpace as a managed service.”
Despite increased competition in the market over recent years, Ret Hat has proved to be effective at holding onto customers. The largest 25 contracts that where up for renewal in the last quarter were all renewed and the new deals were 25% higher in the aggregate. The company also claims that 498 of the largest 500 deals over the last five years have also been removed.
“We never want to lose a deal, if we do, we never give up trying to win back the business,” said Calderoni. “This quarter, I am pleased to report that we closed a multi-million-dollar ‘win-back’ of one of those two former top deals.”
The company also estimates that revenues will grow to between $558 million and $566 million for Q1 and between $2.38 billion and $2.420 billion for the financial year.
Red Hat is teaming up with Italy’s Eurotech in a bid to help Internet of Things projects get bigger and more flexible without sacrificing their security.
The companies have pooled their technical powers to combat the scale, latency, reliability and security weaknesses within complex Internets of Things. Their joint ambition is to obviate the need for the mass consignment of data to the cloud for real-time processing. Instead, they want to set up a more robust alternative system that works by using essential data aggregation, transformation, integration and routing.
North Carolina based open source champion Red Hat and Camaro based machine to machine (M2M) system maker Eurotech say they have two objectives for the IoT: simplify and accelerate. They aim to combine open source cloud software and M2M platforms into a single architecture that bridges the gap between operational and information technology.
All the inherent weaknesses of the IoT – from its lack of scalability to its insecurity – can be tackled by pushing computing power to the network edge, according to the partners. This will help IoT project managers to avoid the risk of shipping masses of data to the cloud for real-time processing. With all the essential data aggregation, data transformation, integration and routing taking place locally, and less exposed to a journey across the cloud, security and performance can be tightened up.
Another productivity dividend will come from placing the processes close to the operational devices. By devolving power away from the centre and allowing remote devices to trigger business rules the partners aim to automate greater numbers of machine processes.
The foundations of this new architecture will be Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and JBoss Middleware along with Eurotech’s Everyware Software Framework and Everyware Cloud. These are to be integrated to provide the security, management and application support spanning the whole hierarchy of the cloud from device tier to the data centre, according to a Red Hat statement.
“Open Source and Java are important pillars in both our strategies. These factors ensure a good alignment,” said Eurotech CMO Robert Andres, CMO, Eurotech.
Customer experience specialist Amdocs claims it has created a system to convert mobile operators from physical network users into comms service providers in the cloud. It unveiled details of the new service at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona.
It has achieved this by blending its Network Cloud Service Orchestrator (NCSO) with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. This, it says, creates an open catalogue driven system that works with any vendor’s equipment. Amdocs claimed it can help mobile operators transform from fixed infrastructure users into cloud friendly communications service providers (CSPs).
The NCSO can orchestrate the mapping of telecommunications services onto a software-led environment, claimed Amdocs. It does this by creating the conditions for continuous design, instantiation and the assurance of complex network services created from virtual network functions (VNFs).
By virtualising functions that were previously bound up with hardware, the NCSO creates a greater degree of fluidity and flexibility. This means CSPs can introduce new services and adapt to customer demand in a fraction of the time, claims Amdocs.
Amdocs chose Red Hat because its Enterprise Linux OpenStack system has emerged as a cloud platform for network function virtualisation, it said.
An Amdocs NCSO, which uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack, has been part of several NFV lab trials with tier one telco providers globally. In the beta trials the telco users have created a range of use cases with multiple vendors, including virtual CPE (customer premises equipment), virtual EPC (evolved packet core) and virtual IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem).
Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses the high-performance Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor as, it claims, this forms a more stable, secure and reliable operating system.
“OpenStack has become a de facto choice for NFV trials across the globe,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat
Hosting company Rackspace has launched Private Cloud which (as the name suggests) is a private cloud ‘as a service’ built on the foundation of OpenStack technology.
The new offering is an addition to its portfolio of Rackspace OpenStack-as-a-Service offerings, as part of the hosting company’s strategy to simplify and popularise OpenStack private and hybrid clouds.
The service is to be fully managed by OpenStack and Red Hat experts at Rackspace and backed by the company’s ‘Fanatical Support’ team. The offering is backed by a guarantee of 99.99% OpenStack API uptime. Rackspace contributes to Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform by testing and certifying hardware and software compatibility and benchmarking its performance and availability. Rackspace manages and maintains the Red Hat environment including the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
It’s all about making the customer’s infrastructure problems go away, according to Darrin Hanson, vice president and general manager of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. “We help make OpenStack simple by eliminating the complexity and delivering it as a service to customers in their data centre, a Rackspace data centre or in a colocation facility,” said Hanson.
A cloud of bioinformatics intelligence has been harmonised by Red Hat to create ‘virtual supercomputers’ that can be shared by the eMedlab collective of research institutes.
The upshot is that researchers at institutes such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger, UCL and King’s College London can carry out much more powerful data analysis when researching cancers, cardio-vascular conditions and rare diseases.
Since 2014 hundreds of researchers across the eMedlab have been able to use a high performance computer (HPC) with 6,000 cores of processing power and 6 Petabytes of storage from their own locations. However, the cloud environment now collectively created by technology partners Red Hat, Lenovo, IBM and Mellanox, along with supercomputing integrator OCF, means none of the users have to shift their data to the computer. Each of the seven institutes can configure their share of the HPC according to their needs, by self-selecting the memory, processors and storage they’ll need.
The new HPC cloud environment uses a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform with Lenovo Flex hardware to create virtual HPC clusters bespoke to each individual researchers’ requirements. The system was designed and configured by OCF, working with partners Red Hat, Lenovo, Mellanox and eMedlab’s research technologists.
With the HPC hosted at a shared data centre for education and research, the cloud configuration has made it possible to run a variety of research projects concurrently. The facility, aimed solely at the biomedical research sector, changes the way data sets are shared between leading scientific institutions internationally.
The eMedLab partnership was formed in 2014 with funding from the Medical Research Council. Original members University College London, Queen Mary University of London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Francis Crick Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute have been joined recently by King’s College London.
“Bioinformatics is a very, data-intensive discipline,” says Jacky Pallas, Director of Research Platforms at University College London. “We study a lot of de-identified, anonymous human data. It’s not practical for scientists to replicate the same datasets across their own, separate physical HPC resources, so we’re creating a single store for up to 6 Petabytes of data and a shared HPC environment within which researchers can build their own virtual clusters to support their work.”
In other news Red Hat has announced a new upgrade of CloudForms with better hybrid cloud management through more support for Microsoft Azure Support, advanced container management and improvements to its self-service features.
Open source software vendor Red Hat has launched a portfolio of open, software-defined storage systems which will cut costs by running on commodity hardware. The systems will be sold through a variety of sources across Red Hat’s sales channel.
The logic of selling Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage system through different channels is to widen the scope of opportunity for Red Hat’s partners, it said. The technology will be made available to any participants in the Red Hat Connect for Business and Red Hat Embedded programmes, as well as all Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers from 2016.
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, software-defined storage systems designed to cater for rapid expansion. They will run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures the vendor said.
Each is suited for different types of enterprise workloads and similarly enterprise customers will be able to mix and match the Red Hat partners whose skill sets are suited to the technical and vertical market conditions.
Red Hat Advanced and Premier partners are authorised to sell Red Hat Storage solutions, but only if they meet the training requirements for their region’s partner programme via the Red Hat Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN). Having qualified, however, the resellers can be kept motivated as they benefit from competitive and flexible pricing models. Further service incentives come from opportunities to earn additional margin and recurring revenue.
Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage subscriptions are scheduled to be available to partners through the Red Hat Embedded Program by the end of 2015. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are scheduled to become available to Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers in 2016.
Training and certification, marketing and sales programs, and technical content for Red Hat Storage solutions will be available to certified partners in the Red Hat Connect for Business Partners portal.
“By making Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage enterprise-procurement friendly, Red Hat is positioning itself as a formidable IT storage supplier,” said Ashish Nadkarni, program director at analyst IDC.