UPDATED 17:24 EDT / JUNE 30 2016

NEWS

From space exploration to cloud innovation at Red Hat Summit | #RHSummit

Day three of the Red Hat Summit 2016 kicked off in San Francisco with a keynote that brought the audience beyond the planet and back to earth with the Innovator of the Year Award.

Answering age-old questions

If you want to see the true implications of how open-source is changing the world, you need only look to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology. Tom Soderstrom, IT chief technology and innovation officer at JPL, spoke first during the keynote about using tools to address age-old questions.

Where could we find life? Did Mars ever house life? Where could we find Earth 2.0, and how do we understand our solar system? These are the questions that JPL is using technology to find answers.

Soderstrom contends that in order to find the answers, JPL needs to change how they work by figuring out the key IT disruptors available. He noted that the consumer space is making rapid innovation in technology while the enterprise lags behind at a glacial pace.

The power of today’s toy

“Today’s toy is tomorrow’s tool,” Soderstrom asserted. He wants to bring them to the enterprise now. “I have an E4 strategy to engage, enable, everyone and everything in the enterprise space,” he continued.

For JPL the IoT landscape is considered a disruptor that, as Soderstrom pointed out, is still in the toy stage, with security issues but useful results. He showed the audience current projects involving IoT, the power of the cloud and analytics for security.

With a wish for JPL to be more open while living with government regulations, he believes that JPL needs to act like a startup and change from rules to principles. Open source will allow the agency to engage and enable the community to answer the age old-questions through the power of participation.

Recognizing innovation

Marco Bill-Peter, VP of Customer Experience and Engagement at Red Hat, Inc., and Chris Wright, VP and chief technologist, Office of Technology, at Red Hat, came on stage to present the Red Hat Innovator of the Year award.

Bill-Peter began by talking about the passion of Red Hat customers to solve problems. “The submissions get better and better and more innovative every year,” stated Wright.

And the nominees are …

Commenting on the diversity of companies and the diversity in locations they are from, Wright revealed that this group of companies is focused on scalability, agility and the consolidation of data, along with security and rapid innovation. To these finalists, the customer experience matters.

Atos – Application development

First up was Atos, an IT consulting and services firm headquartered in London, that was called upon by the British government to help different agencies share sensitive information digitally instead of through fax, phone or printouts. Ultimately Atos chose to deploy Red Hat middleware, platform and management technology. The solution allowed government agencies to share rapidly while being secure and cost ­effective.

Atos used a pay-per-use model: If the solution worked they were paid; if not, there would be no payment. The project was a success, and Atos received compensation.

Paddy Power / Betfair – Modernize

Paddy Power / Betfair, a large public online betting company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, which operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, needed to upgrade its infrastructure to meet the growing number of transactions it was handling.

It needed to automatically update push changes and maintenance without impacting the customer experience. Using Red Hat solutions, the company upgraded its infrastructure to meet these challenges in real time.

Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) – Infrastructure

BSE, headquartered in Mumbai, India, wanted to build a brand-­new trading system that would be the fastest in the world. It also wanted an open-source solution for scalability, operational efficiency, and easier deployment and maintenance. The transition to the new system had to remain seamless to the end user while maintaining external API seamless, with zero downtime.

Using Red Hat Consulting and a Red Hat Technical Account Manager, the exchange expanded from 10 million to 400 million orders per day and reduced hardware costs by 66 percent.

Acuity Systems – Accelerate, integrate, automate

Acuity Systems is a small technology firm headquartered in Herndon, VA. When the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) was looking to improve cost savings, it partnered with Acuity to make better purchasing decisions by analyzing data.

Acuity turned to its partner Red Hat for IT consulting to find open-source solutions to build the GSA’s new Data to Decisions (D2D) platform. According to the case study, the platform collects data from more than 100 data sources and 190 datasets and allows for data to flow between governmental departments. Additionally, by using analytics Data as a Service, there is increased security.

Currently, there is a federal government mandate for agencies to find and use open-source technologies and solutions to provide scalability, security and a reduction in costs.

Amadeus – Cloud

Amadeus is an IT consulting and services company specializing in travel and headquartered in Madrid, Spain. As the customer demand for travel services expanded, the company needed a powerful and agile system to meet the market needs.

The company is focused on open-source community and collaborates upstream, so when it needed a partner, it turned to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to build its infrastructure. According to the case study, this change in technology provided better customer service and streamlined operations and, most importantly, reduced the time for go-to-market solutions.

Genfare – Transform

Genfare, a company with over 130 years of history in the transportation industry is headquartered Elk Grove Village, IL. The company introduced the first mechanical farebox back in 1880, but today customers demand multiple payment options, including mobile payments and credit cards. So, Genfare needed to transform from a hardware company to a software company.

Using Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss, Fuse, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Consulting, the company was able to move the software to a cloud environment and scale to introduce new markets. They are even moving into the IoT space with sensors on buses. Genfare has moved from hardware to software and is looking to embrace the new modern environment.

And the winner is …

Amadeus – Cloud

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

Photo via Red Hat Summit keynote

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