1.Cloud computing is getting adoption within the SMB and the enterprise community, what according to you are the biggest advantages of adopting cloud for these communities?
A.Cost and agility are two of the main factors driving communities to adopt cloud, as both can reap different benefits from a tailored cloud deployment. Investing in cloud can allow organizations to cut costs without sacrificing output quality, especially because cloud computing is offered in a variety of formats to best fit an organization’s size and infrastructure needs. Changes in cloud computing centering around projects based in the open source community can provide a valuable asset of upstream innovation to both communities as well.
Cloud computing can allow smaller businesses or startups to delegate rote tasks and focus on creating product, as opposed to managing large tasks that would distract from functional goals, such as an email server. An Infrastructure-as-a-Service investment can allow businesses and enterprises of varying sizes to elastically scale their cloud resources up and down to fit their business needs. Last, Platform-as-a-Service can allow both communities to develop applications at their own pace and tailored for their business size and at their own pace, allowing them to elastically scale Platform-as-a-Service as their business continues to grow.
2. What is your current focus towards cloud computing?
A.Open hybrid cloud is Red Hat’s technology vision. Many cloud initiatives fail to deliver the promise of agility and value to the business. We believe that building an open and hybrid cloud can help organizations solve real business problems by providing interoperability, workload and data portability, open APIs, and freedom of choice across new and existing heterogeneous infrastructures.
Open technology connects customers to a community of innovation that enables new business capabilities – when they are ready for them. And open standards ensure customers are never limited or locked in. We have a broad portfolio that helps enterprises gain the benefits of an open hybrid cloud with no lock-in and across their choice of physical, virtual and public cloud infrastructures.
An open and hybrid approach to cloud is the only cloud architecture that allows enterprises to bring the benefits of cloud to all of their IT, and is the only way for enterprises to adopt the cloud incrementally while preserving flexibility.
3. How can channel partners benefit from cloud computing segment?
A.Red Hat works with an extensive network of partners to provide customers with reliable support for their cloud deployments. We launched Red Hat’s comprehensive Certified Cloud Provider program – the first of its kind in the industry, Red Hat’s Certified Public Cloud Provider Program provides partners with access to a comprehensive family of Red Hat software and solutions to build out a cloud infrastructure – making sure that each provider in the program meets stringent testing and certification requirements. Backed by our award-winning Global Support Services team, our certified providers have support processes in place quickly to resolve any challenges. By using trusted Red Hat® Certified Cloud Providers, Red Hat customers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and partners can confidently use Red Hat technologies in public clouds.
4. Where is the next level of growth likely to happen from cloud?
A.Last year, president and CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst shared a number of predictions for 2014 in his annual round-up blog. A few of the trends that Whitehurst noted were the move for cloud architectures to go from experimentation to deployment, big data from promise to production, and how we’re going to start seeing glimpses of how these innovations could potentially change our world.
5. What are some of the big challenges that are coming in front of the cloud adoption today? How can you overcome?
A.Moving to the cloud involves some risk as you may transfer part of your IT infrastructure outside of your business to a third party. The key is to managing this risk is to work with trusted cloud providers who have a proven track record in the space. By working with the right provider you can make sure that the right security measures are in place and that you have access to the services the business needs. Working directly with a cloud provider can also ensure the proper service level agreements are in place and that your data is secure.
It is also important to manage your cloud usage properly and make sure employees have access to the resources they need through your cloud provider. If they look outside the business and rogue clouds get into the mix you have essentially lost control over your data. This can lead to data loss and sensitive information being compromised as it is now outside the company firewall. In the long term this can even mean loss of customers and impact on profits.
Some of the largest public clouds are built on open source technologies. Open source technologies allow businesses to build customized clouds that meet the needs of the organization. They achieve this without huge licensing costs, lowering the barriers to entry to allow smaller businesses to develop affordable, custom cloud set ups. Open source clouds also encourage and support the development of new cloud offerings by facilitating collaboration between technology providers.
6. Please share some of your cloud products and initiatives?
A.We helped lead the way to open platform, middleware, and virtualization technologies. From Linux® to JBoss® to OpenStack, Red Hat drives innovation in emerging technology by standardizing software and liberating resources. In fact, the first clouds were built on open Red Hat® technology. And these same open technologies are defining the future of cloud computing and IT.
Our robust cloud portfolio includes products like Red Hat® Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat Storage Server, and OpenShift—Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product suite.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Red Hat® Cloud Infrastructure lets our customer both build and manage an open, private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud based on datacenter virtualization and management technologies. It also offers an on-ramp to a highly scalable, public cloud-like infrastructure based on OpenStack.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Red Hat believes the path to better IT efficiency and innovation lies in the cloud–via public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with OpenShift Online by Red Hat® or private PaaS with Red Hat’s award-winning OpenShift Enterprise.
OpenShift alleviates barriers to IT productivity by:
- Letting developers focus on what they care about most—application code—to speed application development.
- Automating IT processes to streamline IT service delivery.
- Enabling you to use your infrastructure more efficiently across development, test, and production environments.
For more details: http://www.redhat.com/products/cloud-computing/
7. How do you look at the future with more cloud deployments in India?
A.According to research firm Gartner, the Indian enterprise software market is expected to touch about $6.7 billion by 2017. India is one of our key markets in the APAC region as open source is coming up as the driving force behind emerging technologies ranging from cloud to social applications. Big data, analytics, and hyper scale computing will also play a major role in catalyzing the adoption of open clouds among enterprises.