It is evident that open-source is becoming a trend. Many enterprises have trusted and embraced open-source services in the last few years. Red Hat Inc. is no exception. Known for its technology consulting services and its Linux operating system, Red Hat has marked significant progress and growth this year.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Red Hat chief executive and president Jim Whitehurst envisions collaboration as the way of the future. “This is going to radically change the way institutions are managed. The Facebook generation is used to collaborating, and they’re used to a meritocracy. It will change work structures and the nature of the corporation. Most problems can be solved by massive collaboration.”

Red Hat also sees great opportunity in penetrating the Asian market. Whitehurst does not see Asia as a whole market; rather separate markets with very diverse cultures and business practices. China in particular presents a massive opportunity for tech companies. China is still using mainframe systems and the outdated Unix operating system.

Asia has become very attractive for cloud servicing companies. Just last month, Hitachi and VMware teamed up to deliver cloud services to the Asian region. The partnership launched VMware vSphere and VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform to assist financial institutions. SAP and Cisco also partnered to enter the Southwest Asia market.

In a different side of the cloud, researchers from Swiss university ETH Zurich and CloudBroker GmbH, a start-up cloud computing company, have partnered with IBM to conduct a very sophisticated research to develop new antibiotics to fight off deadly diseases.

ETH Zurich’s Institute of Molecular Systems Biology researchers were able to carefully study the functions of disease causing pathogens. Through IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise, researchers were able to identify about 250 potential “virulence factors” – secreted molecules by bacteria, viruses, fungi, or protozoa and then multiply within humans – and create nearly 2.3 million three-dimensional models with nearly 30,000 background data packets. Researchers also have access to almost 250,000 computing hours, with a total of 1,000 parallel CPU’s producing research on the structure of specific proteins found in the streptococcus bacteria, which is the cause of strep throat in humans.

The researchers used open-source software Rosetta, which predicts and designs protein structures, protein folding mechanisms, and protein-protein interactions. With the assistance by CloudBrokers and IBM, researchers were able to analyze huge amount of data in a span of two weeks, instead of the several months it would have taken in the absence of such cloud computing technologies.

ETH Zurich’s lead researcher, Dr. Lars Malmstrom said in a statement, “For our experiments, we need very high capacity in short time frames. Cloud computing allows to reserve this computing capacity whenever researchers need it, and it is available quickly. Research teams do not need to set it up or maintain it, and thus can concentrate better on their research.”