At the center of the recent Red Hat Forum all in virtual reiterated the concepts behind the company’s strategy to accelerate innovation and Digital Transformation. Three main guidelines supported by a complete offer. Technology, processes, people: the open culture stops here

A virtual edition of Red Hat Forum EMEA staged in recent days, characterized by a cross-party plenary session in all countries, chaired by Werner Knoblich – SVP and GM Red Hat Emea, with the task of reiterating strategies and corporate vision, which was followed by the local declinations held by the respective managers of the 14 countries involved (including Italy with the participation of Gianni Anguilletti and Rodolfo Falcone,ed).

A total of over 40 customers on stage, 10 languages spoken, 8 global partners. A shared moment to try to understand together how to rethink the world in an open and collaborative world, just as the open source culturewants.

‘What’s next’? the central theme of the event; a question that has been answered especially in this period characterized by a lot of uncertainty: “Digital Transformation runs fast, accelerated by the current emergency, driven by three intersecting forces: digital customer, digital enterprise, digital workforce. We need to rethink the customer value proposition in digital logic, redesign and optimize business processes and enable the radical transformation of work.

All this keeping in mind the open culture. A task that Red Hat believes it can do best,”says Knoblich. Preparing for an innovative futureThe top manager underlines the key concepts of the company’s strategy, taken up by Gianni Anguilletti in Italy: “The Open unleashes the potential of the world; an innovative way to manage companies in a modern and lock-in way embraced by Red Hat, the enterprise software company that has chosen an Open Source development model”.

Knoblich rattles off some corporate numbers: like the more than 1,000 projects followed worldwide, with 90% of Fortune 500 companies using Red Hat brand products and solutions: “In fact, we are talking about the first open source company worth 3 billion dollars in the world”, says Knoblich, strong of a team of over 16 thousand employees – the redhatters, in more than 105 offices in more than 40 countries. “And one year after the definitive closing of the IBM transaction that acquired Reh Hat in July 2019 for $34 billion, Red Hat is still Red Hat. An independent business unit of IBM, which wants to remain so to continue to guarantee customers and partners its uniqueness.

Partnering with IBM’s competitors, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba,…,” Knoblich emphasizes. On the other hand, the new CEO of the latter, Arvind Krishna, also says: “The Red Hat ecosystem is very strong and must be maintained as such, it is the basis of its success”.

Three main challenges to be overcomeThe top manager, as Gianni Anguilletti did at local level, recalls the three main challenges that must be answered today: the construction and use of hybrid cloud environments, optimizing infrastructure costs; cloud-native application development – enabling faster delivery of new services; management and automation to ensure greater efficiency and security: “In essence, the three levels of an open hybrid cloud architecture like the one proposed by Red Hat, with the Linux operating system at the center, the basis of containerized applications. An architecture that today also extends to the edge – he remarks -. Linux plays a crucial role in infrastructure, we have been working on this operating system for 27 years that today targets containers as a response for the future”.

We go into more detail. The trend of an increasingly pervasive and extensive use of the hybrid cloud is now evident in increasingly multicloud contexts, as emerges from a research (conductedby Qualtrics) shown by Knoblich on the virtual stage: “Many companies use multiple cloud platforms at the same time. And if today only 2% of the companies surveyed get to use four cloud platforms at the same time, within 12 months this percentage will reach 14%”.

Red Hat plays strong on this ground, being able to leverage on anextended hybrid cloud infrastructure portfolio that has red Hat Openshift as the key element; a level of abstraction able to run on all architectures,from the metal bar to the virtual world, to Openstack in the private cloud and to the main public clouds worldwide, being able to exploit the advantages of the public cloud without lock in and away from silo logics. In this sense, the BMW Group has chosen the Red Hat Openshift platform to optimize its hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Red Hat’s commitment also goes to the development of cloud-native applications to support the unstoppable trend that sees workloads conceived in an increasingly ‘containerized’ logic. Also in this case Knoblich reports the research data according to which 63% of the sample says that within 12 months 40% of their applications will be containerized,while today only 30% of companies reach this percentage of applications in container logic.

Also in this case it is the Openshift platform that makes the difference in the wide corporate offer, not only to ‘host’ every type of application but also to guarantee developers greater productivity in the development of digital services, in a fast, secure and automated way. And, on top of Openshift Red Hat offers integration services for data services, to automate processes, for run time, but also the application services of ISV partners. On the EMEA stage it is the turn of the Vodafone case study that has made a Quarkus choice.

Finally, the management and automation components are fundamental. In this sense, the research presented by Knoblich shows that these are among the top priorities today and in the future alongside IT security: “Management & automation are crucial to making hybrid/multi-cloud a reality,” says Knoblich. And here the company’s offer basket puts in place technologies such as Ansible, Satellite and Insights, to help enable ‘infrastructure as a code’.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernates (ACM): a great example of the collaboration with IBM, IBM multi-cluster capabilities for the Openshift platform, a technology that is the result of the joint work of the two teams. The customer story mentioned on stage in this area is that of Swiss Federal Ralway (SBB CFF FFS) with the use of Ansible to automate a multiplicity of devices.

A container-ready platform that goes to the edge

These are the three strategic guidelines enabled by Red Hat,enclosed in acomposite offer,consisting of numerous products, usable individually, but which gives the best when combined together, enriched in the solutions of partners, whose center of gravity is Red Hat Openshift Container Platform and Kubernates is the standard technology for container orchestration.

A technology, the latest, embraced by Red Hat six years ago and, not six months ago, as Knoblich points out:”For this we can say that we have an enterprise-ready container platform, used today in production by over 2 thousand customers”. Among the latest features of Red Hat’s Kubernates container platform is the ability to run both virtual machines and containers simultaneously on the same platform,managed from a single point. It means connecting the past with the future, more traditional fracturing with the most innovative ones, for example in telco areas to enable 5G by pushing to the edge.

All themes taken up in local conversations by business managers and developed by customers in their journeys of technological and business transformation.