Speakers from Red Hat, Inc., SAP SE, and Intel discussed their collaborations and innovations as part of the open-source community during a General Session at the 2015 Red Hat Summit. In keeping with the open spirit, the session started with highlights from the Enable Project, which designs and distributes open-source, 3D-printed prosthetics at no cost to individuals.

The victory of open source

After sharing an excerpt from “Open Source Stories,” Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, took the stage to celebrate the victory of open source over the past few years. He cited the Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” He went on to say, “I’m here to tell you today that Linux and the open-source community have won. And they’ve completed the Gandhi quote here. They can now check the last box.”

Cormier also raised several questions about the new app model of infrastructure. “Are all apps going to have to be stateless in this new world?” he asked. “How do apps run consistently across this new infrastructure? … Is infrastructure going away?”

The answer to some of these questions, he said, lies in the transition to hybrid Cloud as an infrastructure on which to build and deploy apps, as well as the use of containers. The community is also developing an open-storage solution to compete with the proprietary offerings on the market today. Containers have also matured as part of the community’s innovation and endeavors to answer these challenges.

“We’re going to come back next year,” he concluded, “and we’re going to check that last box for the entire infrastructure just as we did for the OS this morning.”

Simplifying enterprise technology

In the second keynote of the morning, Steve Lucas, president of Platform Solutions at SAP started with a joke about Red Hat’s commitment to reliability. “You know you’re at a Red Hat conference,” he said, “when they put the microphone on … [and] they made me wear a backup mic!”

In SAP’s quest to simplify business applications, Lucas said that the company quickly realized it needed to include support for Red Hat. “I believe that at our core, we help companies solve the toughest problems in the world, the toughest challenges, in the simplest manner possible.” And it takes a community to do that well.

One of the biggest innovations it has achieved, according to Lucas, is housing transactional systems, warehouse systems, and predictive systems in the same database using SAP HANA, which now also works via the Cloud. This is all to achieve the goal of simplifying enterprise technology.

Lucas then interviewed Courtland Gray, COO of Peavey Electronics Corp., about how it uses SAP to simplify its business. Gray said that it used to take 30 minutes to two hours to run a report — time they didn’t always have. “We needed to get more information out, get it to the users and decision makers, and just expand it to our distributors around the world as well,” he said.

What happened when it implemented SAP HANA? “Improved speed and better communications,” he stated. “You can get real-time information now. And because you can get the information so much faster, quicker, it just encourages you to get into the system more, to pull more information out, because it’s not painful.”

Optimizing software-defined infrastructure for the app economy

During the final segment of the general session, Doug Fisher, senior VP and GM of the Software and Services group at Intel, talked about how to optimize software-defined infrastructure for the app economy.

One major necessity is the ability to orchestrate workloads responsively. “If you understand information about that compute,” Fisher said, “whether it’s the power, the performance, the location, information about that will help you guide where you put that workload. You’re not going to have a homogenous environment. And so you can move workloads to the appropriate compute platform necessary for that workload execution.”

Fisher then went on to highlight Intel’s contribution to the OpenStack community, which includes four working groups dedicated to Enterprise, Telco, Product and Diversity. These workgroups focus on contributions that will help OpenStack be ready for the mainstream — availability, performance, efficiency, networking and security.

“In the traditional way that Intel works,” Fisher said, “we’re driving all this stuff upstream. We’re ensuring that the upstream capabilities get incorporated into the ecosystem. So we’re driving capabilities upstream, and then we’re working with the ecosystem to adopt these technologies and deliver them to the market.” Intel is also collaborating with CISCO and Dell to help drive on-ramp capabilities.

Fisher ended the session with a call to action. “We all have to work together to make this possible,” he said. “So let’s go forward, let’s light it up, and let’s make software-defined infrastructure the way of the future.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE