Red Hat and SUSE on Servers

Nigel Kersten says claims that the deal is a cloud play are "ridiculous"
IBM shocked the tech industry earlier this year when it snapped up open source stalwart Red Hat in a $34 billion mega-deal.

The acquisition marks the biggest software merger in history, and the general assumption is that IBM is intending to leverage Red Hat's experience in the cloud computing market to bolster its own efforts in this area as it seeks to pivot from old-school on-premise infrastructure to newer revenue streams.

Not everyone agrees with this, however. Nigel Kersten is vice-president of ecosystem engineering at open source firm Puppet, and previously served as CIO, CTO and chief technical strategist. According to him, the idea that IBM is buying Red Hat for its cloud credentials is laughable.

IBM is focusing to keep it easier for customers to move to multi-cloud environments by adding automation tools to its cloud services. And, the tech-giant is enlarging its relationship with cloud migration specialists ServiceNow. Both the moves are taken to help customer simplify some hard tasks includes moving new and legacy applications to multi-cloud environments on IBM’s own cloud service or others such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Red Hat.

To magnify its new services, IBM last month said it would buy open-source software pioneer Red Hat for nearly $34 billion stock acquisition. On the other hand, the deal would be bought enormous opportunities for IBM making it a large open source and enterprise software player worldwide. This will help the company make its mark into the lucrative hybrid-cloud party targeting prominent market players including Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others.

To support the company’s goal of becoming the leading IT infrastructure software provider in ASEAN, Damien Wong, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, developed the Red Hat ASEAN 2.0 Strategy to guide the company's business for fiscal years FY16-FY18 using a collaborative and inclusive approach.

Wong is known for his dynamic leadership style where he recommended the adoption of a Balanced Scorecard approach, covering Financial, Market, Customer, and Employee goals. This strategy, which favoured an approach that did not just emphasise financial results alone, was developed to guide the Red Hat ASEAN team across the fiscal years FY16-FY18. For developing the Red Hat ASEAN 2.0 Strategy, Wong clinched the Executive of the Year for Computer Software at the SBR Management Excellence Awards 2018.

For those of us who work with technologies every day, it’s important to remember one key thing: every topic is new to someone somewhere every day.

With that in mind, we are starting a series of posts here that will start from basics to help you build your knowledge of modern application delivery. Think of it as Containers 101.
To understand what containers are and how they benefit application developers, devops, and operations teams, let’s look at an essential change in the architecture of applications: the use of microservices.

Despite its more than 25 years, SUSE felt like a mature start-up, and as a boss and “personal firewall” (as the team would call me), I was allowed to nearly triple the team size, 40% of which are female writers (and technology experts!!) today. I learnt what it means to “lead a world-wide remote team”, including budget and staff responsibility.