Red Hat Summit, the leading Open Source event, goes virtual this year on Tuesday 27 and Wednesday 28 April. The summit offers a mix of innovation, collaboration and learning opportunities.
This year’s special guests are:
- Joseph Gordon-Levitt, award-winning actor, director and screenwriter: Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s film career spans three decades, with outstanding performances on television (“3rd Rock from the Sun”), in arthouse cinema (“Mysterious Skin”, “Brick”) and in multiplex releases (“Inception”, “500 Days of Summer”, “Snowden”). He is also the founder and interim CEO of the online creative platform HITRECORD
- Ben Folds: widely regarded as one of the leading musical influencers, Ben Folds has created pop albums with Ben Folds Five, as well as solo releases and a series of collaborative records. He channels his passion for curiosity, storytelling and creativity as an actor, photographer and author, publishing a New York Times bestselling book in 2019 entitled “A Dream About Lightning Bugs”.
- Mick Ebeling: winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award, Mick Ebeling has been named one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders by Fortune magazine and one of the most influential creatives in the world as part of AdAge’s Creativity 50. He is currently drawing on his experience and background as a producer and director in his role as founder and CEO of Not Impossible, a social innovation lab and production company.
- Ken Johnson, Vice President, Application Services Business Unit, Red Hat
- Kumail Nanjiani: Oscar-nominated writer and critically acclaimed actor and comedian, Kumail Nanjiani has starred in films (“The Lovebirds” and “The Big Sick”) and on television (the Emmy Award-winning “Silicon Valley” and “Little America”). He and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, also created the podcast “Staying in with Emily and Kumail”, with all proceeds donated to charities helping people affected by COVID-19.
Ellen Lafferty, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Red Hat
- Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat
- Lucy Kerner, Director, Security Global Strategy and Evangelism, Red Hat
Red Hat’s goal is to solve its customers’ challenges.
Red Hat’s Cloud is a type of Cloud built on Openshift and based on Linux software.
Red Hat considers the Hybrid Cloud and the Open Cloud to be the most beneficial in enabling its customers to improve their business, offering vertical solutions with a hybrid and open architecture.
In the future, according to Red Hat, the cloud will not be a single technology but a multitude of technologies that will go by the name of Cloud continued and will serve to improve customers’ operations, working in synergy.
According to Red Hat, companies take three steps towards the cloud.
- Step I = Migrate, i.e. bring most of the work to the Cloud, around 20%, and within 3-5 years the remaining 80% will move to the Cloud.
- Step II = Acceleration. Decisions are made and taken towards consumption. The organisation must work together on both the Business side and the IT side.
- Step III = Use Cloud services to improve your own business.
Red Hat’s marketing is customer-centric. What does that mean?
For Red Hat the customer is at the centre of everything, and to make this possible results must be optimised together with its Partners in order to deliver excellent results to the customer.
Red Hat also announced that in 2021 the cloud will be available on all platforms as an operating model, that thanks to SAP they accelerated revenue growth in 2020 and that Intel has become a leader for acceleration in the system.
In Marketing, documenting case studies is essential for Red Hat to demonstrate the success of its customers.
2021 outlook
- Winning the platforms
- Scaling up with Partner ecosystems
- Growing Cloud and Multi Cloud
- Digital subscription renewals.
- Sales bonuses for excellence
- Turning Red Hat Market Place into a digital marketplace.
- The entire portfolio needs to be renewed so that customers can address their whole architecture.
As we have already said, according to Red Hat, when its Partners win, its customers win too.
We can therefore say that, according to the company, the life cycle consists of 3 parts:
- Building
- Selling
- Support
During the summit, various cloud platforms were discussed, including: Red Hat Openshift, Redhat Insight and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, AI Platform, a type of platform based on artificial intelligence, to meet customers’ business needs. Infrastructure: Openshift.
Creative collaboration: a conversation with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
The company’s strength lies in the use of an Open source platform that allows people from all over the world to come together.
According to Joseph Gordon-Levitt, there is a difference between doing something with the result in mind and doing something that gives us satisfaction. He argues that doing things we do not know how to do is good for the brain: it helps us grow.
We need to focus on being creative. In his view, the creative process is what gives us the most joy. The platform helps people build their own creative process by sharing it with others.
He took a proactive approach, reaching out to the less visible people (the community) and asking them:
- Why did you come to this platform?
- Why did you leave?
- What did you like and what didn’t you like?
Community goals
People come to the platform to learn and they need to be supported. The community must come first and must be Open, meaning that anyone can earn a place on the leaders’ podium.
There must always be leadership in order to do something more productive. In his view, a good leader always starts from first principles and is able to explain clearly the various decisions that lead to achieving a goal.
In collaboration, limits are essential: they make it possible to understand how far the human mind can go in the creative process without losing sight of the final goal.
Accelerating Innovation in the Hybrid world through open source. Ken Johnson
- Developers (productivity and efficiency) have tools and frameworks at their disposal that allow them to work autonomously.
- Software delivery automation. Automation is becoming a strategic solution in the business market. There must be no errors from the outset, and the solution to the problem must be available straight away, so that the customer can steer their decision right from the start.
- Keyword = composability, i.e. composing with more precise modules than in the past.
How do customers work out which resources are right for them?
There are applications that meet customers’ needs. The app must be constantly updated.
Example: the Poste Italiane case study.
With the Openshift platform they built up the innovation capital needed to compete with BHL, Federal Express.
Red Hat’s approach to an Open Hybrid Cloud Strategy Ellen Laferty
Today’s technology gives greater support to the customer; it is a combination of old and new infrastructures.
Three things are needed for this new technological world:
- Speed
- Stability
- Scalability
Future technologies vision Chris Wright
Open Source brings many ideas together under a single concept.
The Cloud has changed expectations about how our applications are consumed; there is now an expectation that applications will be consumed as services.
We need to meet this expectation by extending our current resources with deployments at the Edge.
Security approaches for hybrid cloud environments Lucy Kerner
We need to understand where we want to keep our sensitive data and where it is located in our environment.
You cannot protect something if you do not know it exists. To protect ourselves, we must make sure we use the resources we have access to.
The whole company needs to be automated consistently in order to solve problems caused by human beings, such as configuration problems. Security is not just about products but also about people. It is essential to build a Cyber Security team within the company.
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