With its latest numbers showing channel sales up to 75% from the 69% in Q2 2015, Red Hat is building its channels skills, especially in cloud and services. One obvious way to help is with the rapidly advancing move to cloud and containers. Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift at Red Hat told IT Europa that customers want cloud delivery and choice. “Increasingly we are finding that customers want this in the cloud and delivered as a SaaS and containerised.” And containerisation is also proving its value with developers and integrators, he explains.
As Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst told analysts last month: “Containers and thinking about how to consume and manage containers is the single biggest topic that comes up among what I think of as technology leading [customers] - financial services, technology and telco customers.”
“You can build a story around efficiency of running your infrastructure,but that is not what's driving this. Developer efficiency is what is driving this. There are also several issues around security. What's in the container is critically important and virtualisation does nothing to help with that. What's in the container is basically the user space side of the operating system.”
The market is driving interest among older software companies as well. In software delivery, large companies are facing changes as traditional software businesses under threat from new business. So Red Hat is working with some large software companies such as CAI to build services on the platform. “The logical move is to offer the software as a Docker package. This makes the offering more modern and makes it quicker to deliver. We have several such deals with large software vendors who are also looking to make their solutions easier to use by SMBs.”
By running it on OpenShift, an open, hybrid Platform-as-a-Service, they got more agility and flexibility, being able to work between on premise and cloud. “This is one of the main interest points for containerisation.” It also makes it easier and cheaper than using virtual machines. “Now, when we have common APIs in Docker and work to common governance as used by IBM, Google, Amazon etc; this is a huge win for users and developers,” he says. OpenShift is designed to allow developers to quickly develop, host, scale and deliver apps in the cloud.
“When we have conversations, the topic of containers comes up because of the benefits to customers, but it is also easier for developers to run in different environments. It is just a much quicker path.”
“The next class of partners are the systems integrators – we are seeing a lot of interest here – the likes of Accenture and the large Indian integrators as well as the smaller regional firms. They are investing quite a lot of time and energy on getting their staff skilled up. More than 90% of the conversation with customers is about how to use cloud, how to use containers, then what is the best practice on architectures and how to use the giant applications available from Amazon etc, then finally how to use devops. These are the four big trends for us, and are key to integrators themselves.”
“We are starting to see a lot of projects driven both by customers and the integrators themselves using containerisation. If you are an SI and not yet skilling up, it is going to be an increasingly difficult world for you. In Europe, we find smaller companies can create an increasingly profitable niche because of the demand and one market for this is financial services who want to stay leading edge.”
“We are talking to cloud providers who face customer demand and who are working on private cloud on demand. They want to offer a flexible environment at a good price; within this group, there is another number of service providers who are watching what Google and Amazon provide and want to offer their own platform to give flexible solutions. There is a certain reluctance to change because they have been used to working a certain way, however.”
It seems to be just a matter of time before containerisation emerges as a full blown way of working for many customers, already displacing virtualisation as a discussion topic with vendors.
- Two new Red Hat offerings include an IT engineer-level OpenStack certification, Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) in Red Hat OpenStack, and accompanying exam, Red Hat Certified Engineer in Red Hat OpenStack exam as well as an IT engineer-level course, Red Hat OpenStack Administration III
- The 12th annual gathering of the open source cloud computing infrastructure community, OpenStack will take place in Tokyo, October 27-30, 2015, at the Grand Prince International Convention Centre & Hotels. This Summit will focus on OpenStack as an integration engine for new cloud computing technologies, with container management, public clouds and networking technologies taking the spotlight. The event theme is “OpenStack-Powered Planet,” highlighting the power of a global network of public and private clouds running a common and interoperable set of core services. Breakout sessions will dive deeper into software-defined networking—including progress on the OpenStack Neutron project—next generation telco networks, and emerging markets like Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Internet of Everything (IoE).