There is an I.T. innovation gap between business demand for innovation and the capability for innovation on traditional infrastructure, according to open source solutions provider Red Hat.
To fill in this gap, businesses must be more immediate, more pervasive and more aware. But this approach can only be enabled by an open hybrid cloud environment.
Damien Wong, Red Hat’s general manager for ASEAN (left) and Law Yaw Hu, ASEAN senior manager for channel sales at Red Hat.
In a meeting with members of the press, Damien Wong, Red Hat’s general manager for ASEAN, stressed that businesses must embrace open standards and make use of what are available in the public cloud if they want to successfully reap the benefits of an open hybrid cloud environment.
In 2013, Red Hat launched a number of products to support its customers journey to an open hybrid cloud. These included Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, which comprises of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, all of which makes up the company’s solution to build the foundation for a future-proof cloud.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is Red Hat’s commercially supported edition of the OpenStack cloud hosting software. The package is built on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 Linux distribution, and includes RHEV for managing virtual machines running on the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor.
Red Hat CloudForms is a management tool that can oversee multiple hypervisor environments, while Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 features a new API (application programming interface) for backing up and restoring virtual machines.
Quoting from a report by Forrester, Wong said that the “cloud is now a viable option for a broad range of enterprise workloads and is actually prefered for a growing class of new customer-facing web and mobile applications.”
Meanwhile, SourceNinja projects that by 2016, open source software will be included in mission-critical software portfolios of 99% of Global 2000 enterprises, up from 75% in 2010.
Online training for partners
The company also launched an online training and accreditation platform to give partners control on where and when to access guidance and technical information in servicing customers.
Law Yaw Hu, ASEAN senior manager for channel sales at Red Hat, says the Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN) intends to place partners in control of their training by making accreditation available at all times in order to reduce the time and expenses required to complete them.
According to Law, OPEN is aligned to three specialised tracks: Specialist Partner Accreditation (value pitch, sales qualification, competitive positioning, objection handling, and pricing); Engineer Accreditation (technical sales and qualification, competitive positioning, objection handling, pricing, how-to demo, and product knowledge); Partner Accreditation (product installation, application development, proof-of-concept delivery, and solution architecture).
The program includes role-specific, self-paced training accreditations for sales, sales engineers, and delivery engineers, alongside the Red Hat Partner Demo System (featuring pre-configured demonstrations for the company’s portfolio of open hybrid Cloud solutions and e-learning courses) and an online Red Hat Partner Technical Library which offers tagged, searchable and dynamic content.
Channel growth is a key focus area for Red Hat this year. In fact, partners contribute 70% of the company’s revenues. In the Philippines, Red Hat has 20 active partners.
Reaping the benefits of open source
“Organizations are now not only seeing the benefits of using open source, but are experiencing faster innovation, and creating greater business opportunities,” said Wong.
Among Red Hat’s clients in the Philippines is Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. which has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on an IBM z10 mainframe server.
RCBC has been dependent on its core banking system running on IBM mainframe to support its banking operations for more than 20 years. The aging system could not cope with changing business requirements, which hampered business growth and customer service activities.
Prior to deploying the new core banking system which runs on RHEL, it took 10 months for the bank to generate new account numbers for the main business centre. In addition, new deposit products often required application development because of unavailable features, taking up to 167 days to develop. Changes in withholding tax rulings took four months to complete.
With RHEL supporting the core banking system, RCBC is now able to grow and adapt to changes without technological constraints. For example, generation of new account now involves just changing a parameter setting in the new system. In addition, the deployment of applications take just three days instead of one week.
