Red Hat Analyst Day vision focuses on AI and automation
Organizations are embracing modern distributed cloud environments. At its analyst day, Red Hat advised taking a platform approach to simplify operations and speed innovation.
- Bob Laliberte,
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Enterprise Strategy Group
We provide market insights, research and advisory, and technical validations for tech buyers.
At the recent virtual Red Hat analyst event, we had the opportunity to interact with several Red Hat executives to better understand the company's vision and future.
While many already know what Red Hat stands for, it's probably worth a quick review. The company has three core tenets:
- Derive technology in open-source upstream communities. This is an upstream-first approach to building technology.
- Focus on core platform-level technologies that help entire industries evolve. Red Hat views these platforms as common technical building blocks that organizations need to modernize their environments. The company has three core platforms including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Open Shift and Ansible. For more product details, check out my colleague Paul Nashawaty’s blog as well.
- Do everything in an open way to ensure customers have choice and flexibility.
Based on its three platforms, Red Hat is looking to build out products and services that enable customers to leverage AI and data driven options, ensure compliance and mitigate risk while also differentiating their businesses. Red Hat understands that modern IT environments are highly distributed, with applications deployed in private data centers, multiple public clouds and edge locations. Because of the increased complexity resulting from these environments, the ability to use AI and automation will also be critical for operations and development teams.
Why should customers care?
According to Tech Target's Enterprise Strategy Group's "End-to-end Network Visibility and Management Trends" research, 97% of organizations reported they are using multiple public clouds, and 95% from "Distributed Cloud Series: Digital Ecosystems" (August 2022), that edge computing is a top priority.
The use of AI will not only deliver real-time business insights to provide differentiated services and improve quality, but it also will have a significant impact on operations teams. According to ESG's "2022 Technology Spending Intentions Survey", organizations have reported for the last five years that driving operational efficiency is the top IT goal of digital transformation initiatives. This is especially important with so many organizations struggling to find skilled employees, with top shortages in cybersecurity and in cloud and IT architects.
The use of open source software can provide organizations with the ability to reduce hardware costs, drive greater agility with a consistent platform across distributed cloud environments (data centers, public clouds and edge) and make use of an ecosystem of developers to accelerate innovation.
Red Hat has worked diligently to provide a trusted supply chain, software bill of materials (SBOM) and developer hub to mitigate risk while also accelerating innovation. The company has been working with the IBM Watson group to bring forward open generative AI products to accelerate ansible playbooks (Lightspeed) and more. At the edge, Red Hat has developed in-vehicle OS as well as products for edge devices and servers. Red Hat backs up its claims with customer success stories that include large telecommunication providers, financial services and manufacturing companies.
As organizations create highly distributed cloud environments, it will be imperative to take a platform approach to simplify operations and accelerate adoption on innovative technologies. Organizations need to decide if they are going to take an open-source-first approach or continue to rely on proprietary solutions. Given the rate of transformation in all industries, now is the time to evaluate available options and choose a strategic partner. It will be worth your time to include Red Hat on your list, for both its current offering and the innovation that will be delivered in the future.
Bob Laliberte is a principal analyst at TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group who focuses on existing and emerging network technologies, and on application and network performance management products and services used by enterprises and service providers.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.
