Today’s businesses are looking to do more with less. So, why is it important for technology institutions to dedicate resources for their internal teams toward innovation?

Red Hat Inc., a worldwide leader in open-source modernization, has contributed progress toward unconventional solutions to help solve the larger scope of problems in the tech world. One of the company’s most recent product inventions is sigstore.

“You’ve probably heard of it. It’s the gold standard now for container signing,” said Erin Boyd, (pictured) distinguished engineer and director of emerging technologies with Red Hat. “That came directly out of emerging technologies … we’re seeing what our customers are struggling with, we understand the security space, and so then we helped grow and mature that project into a very large community to help solve one of those problems.” 

Backstage is another service incubated within the minds of Red Hat’s top engineers.

“Red Hat would really love to crack that open and figure out how we can, as a community, solve those problems more collaboratively. And so Backstage was one of the tools that we were using to experiment on how could this work, how could it integrate into OpenShift and how can we expand it out into what our customers need,” Boyd said. 

Boyd spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Paul Gillin and Rob Strechay at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media ‘s livestreaming studio. They discussed what transformations and reorganizations companies are implementing to align their goals with the future of open-source technology and how open source contributes to innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Innovating with intention

Red Hat prioritization its solution innovations based on customer needs. According to Boyd, the company needs to understand “… first of all, is this something that is on a hype cycle, as you see within emerging tech? Or is this something that can really be viable to our customers and in what sense?”

Red Hat is also looking at bringing down the size of models and open the next chapter into open-source technology by creating new products that customers can even use as a prototype. Another new revolutionary tech product Red Hat has created is Kepler, or Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter. The project was founded by Red Hat’s emerging technologies group with early contributions from IBM Research and Intel. The idea behind Kepler was to appropriately measure the energy and resources being used.

“We really are taking into consideration how do we standardize reporting of these metrics down to the kernel level?” Boyd said. “Then how are we measuring that and improving it and scheduling it in a way that makes better use of the hardware?”

Another fairly powerful concept is customer co-creation, where the partner and client create a preliminary model of a product by request. The subject matter experts converse with their customers about current and ongoing issues.

Boyd believes that “the pain points of today also gives us some insight into what could be the possible pain points in the future. It’s kind of seeing around corners. We have to consider there’s going to be different architectures that we may need to run on because of all those things. So it’s seeing the problem, but also seeing beyond.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit:

(* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE