We’re well into 2010, and have a full schedule of events at Red Hat. Check out where you can find Red Hat this month- make sure to stop by at these events to learn more about the latest Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

Looking for information about Red Hat Summit and JBoss World? Click here.

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Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Red Hat will be at AFCEA West in San Diego, CA, Feb. 2–4, 2010. Come visit us at booth #1316. Co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute, AFCEA West 2010 is the largest event on the West Coast for communications, electronics, intelligence, information systems, imaging, military weapon systems, aviation, shipbuilding and more. For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be a Gold sponsor of The CIO Summit of America in New York City, Feb. 8, 2010. Red Hat will be located at booth #2. Lee Congdon, Vice President, IT and CIO of Red Hat, will be speaking in the Emerging Technologies track during the event. For more information on the event and how to register, click here.

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra will moderate a panel that includes Red Hat vice president of Open Source Affairs, Michael Tiemann at the Emerging Issues Forum: Enabling Creativity through Technology, Feb. 9, 2010 at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, NC. Listen to panelists discuss the relationships between creativity and technology and the tensions that exist between the free flow of information and ownership of ideas. Can’t make it? Tune into local channel UNC-TV for a live broadcast.

Red Hat and Intel are co-sponsoring a RISC Migration Luncheon and Workshop in Houston, TX on Feb. 9, 2010. This event targets Red Hat and partner customers, director level and below, interested in learning more about any part of the migration cycle from UNIX to Linux. For more information and to register, click here.

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On February 10, Red Hat will present its 2nd Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, a day-long virtual forum hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. Similar to our first forum, held in July 2009, the virtual event will feature a dozen half-hour, high-impact technical presentations that cover recent developments in open source cloud computing. The presentations will provide attendees with a view of the large scope of development and deployment work that is underway today, including a look into usage scenarios. As before, we hope that the forum will act as a catalyst for open source communities to work together, grow and encourage participation in the development of open source cloud computing.

The agenda for our February 10 forum is as follows:

To register for the forum, visit here.

I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.

We’ve had an exciting past 12 months and here are just a few of the many things that kept Red Hat busy in 2009:

• Taking on the global recession
  Looking at Red Hat’s growth over the past several quarters, many have wondered if we were even aware that the world was in the midst of the worst recession in modern history. Red Hat has grown at double-digit rates in both revenue and headcount throughout the course of the recession. Open source appears to be thriving in a down economy and reduced IT budgets drew many CIOs to take a closer look at open source as a cost-effective solution. Customers continue to turn to Red Hat as we differentiate ourselves from the competition with high value, low cost solutions. This combination is important to customers in not only challenging times, but also robust economic environments.
• Washington embraces open source
  When Obama was sworn in last January as President of the United States, he brought the promise of an unprecedented level of openness and transparency in government. Just one day after taking office, Obama issued a transparency memo to all department heads. This memo was followed by several announcements surrounding open source and government. In October, Whitehouse.gov announced its move to Drupal for content management. A few days later, the deputy CIO for the Department of Defense issued a memo clarifying guidance on the use of open source software and its advantages. Finally, we closed out 2009 with the White House issuing its Open Government Directive in December. This move to transparency and openness in government is encouraging for open source software.
• Up in the clouds
  The use of cloud computing is growing rapidly as enterprises look to reduce costs and increase their operational flexibility. Red Hat greatly expanded its cloud initiatives in 2009 as open source emerged as a foundational element for both public and private clouds. In June, we announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, designed to simplify and expand enterprise customers’ adoption of cloud computing by allowing industry leaders to certify on Red Hat solutions. With the news, we announced that Amazon Web Services had become our first Red Hat Premier Cloud Provider, building on the relationship we formed with Amazon in 2007 to offer Red Hat solutions on Amazon EC2. Soon after, we announced a cloud computing collaboration with Verizon Business as Red Hat Enterprise Linux was offered as one of the first two operating platforms available for Verizon’s new Computing as a Service (CaaS) solution.

  In July, Red Hat held its first Open Source Cloud Computing Forum to foster discussion around and advance the development of open source cloud computing technologies. The interest that the forum drew from across the industry has prompted us to continue the conversations started in July through a second Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, taking place on Wednesday, February 10, 2010.

  Also in 2009, we announced a new open source project named Deltacloud. The project aims to enable an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across public and private clouds. We expect that open source technologies, and specifically Red Hat solutions, will continue to provide the foundation for enterprise cloud deployments into the future.

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With the EU’s approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, Oracle is acquiring a major hardware and software player, and perhaps most significantly, they are now taking stewardship of the Java platform. As Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said shortly after the acquisition announcement in April of last year, Java is “the single most important software asset we have ever acquired.”

We agree with Mr. Ellison’s statement; Java is one of the most important technologies developed and adopted during the past twenty years. It has fostered significant innovation throughout the IT industry and has enabled businesses and governments to operate with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Java is larger than any single company; we are all part of Java, customers and vendors alike. Now, that Oracle has become a more significant guardian of Java, they have an opportunity to foster and expand the principles that made Java the successful platform that it is today. Oracle has an opportunity to continue to make Java stronger and viable by making the process more open and the technology more accessible.

Red Hat has played a leadership role in the Java Community Process for many years and we support making the Java process open and inclusive for all. We were one of the first companies to applaud and support Sun when they created an open source license of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with the introduction of OpenJDK. Most recently, we led two critical specifications that were adopted as part of Java EE 6. Our goal is to make Java easier to use, more appealing to developers and beneficial to all organizations building and using software.

Over the last several years many Java Community Process (JCP) members were concerned that the future of Java was in jeopardy because the community process, under the stewardship of Sun, was not open enough. Despite the early success of the JCP, many members thought that Sun was beginning to stifle the potential of Java in order to serve its own commercial interests. Oracle along with the support of other IT vendors including Red Hat, recommended that Sun should transform the JCP into a more open and inclusive governing body, thereby securing the future and viability of Java. To that end, many recommendations were submitted to the JCP by Oracle and others. For example, Oracle submitted a public motion to the JCP Executive Committee to make changes to JCP governance. Here is what Oracle said:“It is the sense of the [JCP] Executive Committee that the JCP become an open, independent vendor-neutral Standards Organization where all members participate on a level playing field….”

In effect, Oracle was among several leaders asking Sun to make Java and the Java process more open and less prone to self-serving actions by a single vendor. Red Hat supported Oracle’s initiative to make Java inclusive and open then, and we encourage Oracle to fulfill its original proposal now. We believe that an open, independent JCP is critical for the future success of Java.

Now as the Java platform changes hands we have high hopes that Oracle will not only serve as a faithful steward of this important technology, but will also be a positive force in driving the future of Java in collaboration with the members of the JCP. Additionally, Oracle has an opportunity to grow customer and vendor adoption of Java, not by imposing undue licensing requirements that might be contrary to the principles of Java accessibility, but by making the process more open and the technology more accessible. It is no surprise that at Red Hat, one of the last truly home grown open source providers in the marketplace, open standards and an inclusive, collaborative process are one of our highest priorities.

To that end, we encourage Oracle to fulfill its opportunity to keep Java and the Java development process open, inclusive, and easily accessible to all. We encourage Oracle to ensure that Java remains open so that customers can continue to benefit from the hallmarks of a technology standard. We encourage Oracle to make sure that the Java development process is inclusive to all vendors and customers so Java can leverage ideas from the widest set of stakeholders which will benefit all equally. We encourage Oracle to fulfill their original proposal and establish an independent governance process for the JCP. And, finally, we encourage Oracle to continue the tradition of making the technology easily accessible, to vendors and customers alike, to secure its broad adoption and continued strength in the market.

To Oracle we say; congratulations on the impending close of the deal and welcome to the stewardship of “the single most important software asset” you’ve ever acquired. We look forward to working with you in your new role as you use this position to make real, positive industry change for the Java platform.

Happy New Year! We hope everyone enjoyed ringing in 2010. As we jump into the new year, check out where you can find Red Hat this month. Looking for information about Red Hat Summit and JBoss World? Click here to learn more about sponsorships at Red Hat Summit and JBoss World and the Call for Papers, open until January 22, 2010.

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.

Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

Come visit Red Hat at Lotusphere, January 17-21, at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, FL. Red Hat will be at booth #403 and #404. Learn about our latest virtualization offerings and much more! For more information and to register, click here.

Red Hat will be hosting a lunch with Intel and Dell on January 20 at Seasons 52 in Dunwoody, GA. Get the information you need to start planning a migration from RISC/UNIX. At the lunch, you will learn about proven best practices, receive an illustrative roadmap, and an efffective migration plan for you and your IT staff. For more information and to register, click here.

Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s vice president of open source affairs, will present at the University of Maryland, January 20, about improving the efficiency and capability of end-user computing platforms.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APAC

For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.

Latin America

For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.

Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com

Last week our developers attended the launch of Google Web Toolkit 2.0 (GWT) at Google’s Campfire event. We were truly excited to see the level of interest and participation in the event and feel that it’s a snapshot of what is really happening with GWT both in the development community and also for enterprise application of this technology.

Not surprisingly, GWT is a technology that has influenced many areas of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware product suite as well as projects within the JBoss Community. GWT plays a part in the strategy behind our JBoss Open Choice strategy which we launched this year at JavaOne. The Open Choice strategy was driven by customer demand and a desire for customers to pick and choose the best, most productive technology yet still be able to benefit from world-class capabilities and support. We seek to deliver on this strategy through products such as the JBoss Web Framework Kit and development frameworks like Seam which provides a GWT integration layer.

Providing world class support and packaging for our customers to leverage GWT in their own applications is just the starting point. GWT also enables us to extend our capabilities to non-developers within our products. The console for the JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) utilizes GWT to assist business analysts in creating and managing SOA centric business rules across multiple enterprise applications. GWT also is leveraged within the JBoss Business Process Manager (JBPM) components to assist in the development of workflows and processes. JBPM is included in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and leveraged in features in both the JBoss SOA and Portal Platforms today.

Our efforts to embrace and in some cases extend GWT are available through several JBoss Community projects. GateIn, our new portal project includes the ability for end users to easily create GWT widgets and portlet based applications and dashboards within a secure, personalized site experience. And our latest effort, Project Errai is a new GWT based framework that provides developers federated and flexible client side integration for next generation web applications.

Looking ahead we plan to continue our collaboration with Google, both in our community efforts and in leveraging the GWT technology for our customers. Stay tuned for more information on this strategic partnership.

Several times each year, the community-driven, Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project holds the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) at locations around the globe. FUDCon brings developers, contributors, and enthusiasts together to share knowledge about and visionary planning for the next generation of open source technologies. Insightful and educational technical sessions are followed by code sprint sessions, or hackfests, where participants work together to design and create the future of the Fedora distribution and contribute to the upstream communities where open source starts. You can watch this video to see how Red Hat later harnesses that upstream work to create additional value in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This past weekend, the Fedora Project held one of its largest events ever at the York campus of Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Over 200 talented Fedora developers and contributors started off Saturday morning in the Stephen E. Quinlan Building using the BarCamp method of “unconference” organization. The crowd was so large that we overflowed into a second large lecture hall, joined by video and audio conferencing to the first. Speakers pitched their talks, and audience interest decided the final schedule for the day, which filled lecture halls and classrooms throughout the building. Often people attend professional conferences and report that their best experiences happened in the hallway, talking to peers and luminaries. Our approach to FUDCon takes this so-called “hallway track” and makes it the focal point of the event, and as a result the conference includes much richer and satisfying content. Featured FUDCon talks included:

• A demonstration and lecture on the future of desktop interaction through the GNOME Shell interface
• The state of the kernel and X graphical system projects, and what’s coming next in those upstreams
• A wide variety of information on the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and its application in Fedora infrastructure, the Fedora Community portal, and other projects
• How to develop applications for Moksha, the new open source framework for real-time web collaboration
• A full set of user- and contributor-oriented educational talks, from installing Fedora to filing better bugs or helping with design work

» Read more

Red Hat Enterprise MRG was first released in June 2008, debuting Red Hat’s Messaging, Realtime and Grid technology offerings. In February 2009, Enterprise MRG 1.1 offered enhanced performance, clustering, security and tooling improvements, along with full support for the product’s Grid functionality. Today, Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2, which includes key performance improvements and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.

With its newest release, Enterprise MRG offers customers the expanded ability to combine Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies with the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product portfolio and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 to aggregate and build internal clouds. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, delivered to customers in September and November respectively, are Red Hat’s first products to incorporate Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 features the following enhancements to its three major technology pieces:

1. Messaging
   In the 1.2 release, Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging includes improvements to core messaging infrastructure and performance enhancements that meet highly demanding customer requirements. With these enhancements, Enterprise MRG Messaging has achieved a number of impressive industry benchmark results, including:
   • Infiniband throughput of greater than 1.5 million reliable messages per second, per system

     

     MRG Messaging Infiniband Throughput. Click to enlarge.
   • Infiniband RDMA latency of under 40 microseconds, reliably acknowledged

     

     MRG Messaging Infiniband RDMA Latency. Click to enlarge.
   • Messaging on KVM virtualized performance of over one million messages per second throughput
   • Messaging on KVM virtualized performance of less than 200 microsecond latency, reliably acknowledged
2. Realtime
   Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 Realtime performance enhancements improve the deterministic low latency of performance-intensive and time-critical workloads. Additionally, MRG Realtime includes a new tool, rteval, to help customers detect hardware latencies in their systems. Together with Red Hat’s intensive hardware certification program for Enterprise MRG Realtime, rteval provides customers with the tools and assurance that the entire infrastructure, from hardware to the operating system, provides optimal performance for realtime workloads.
3. Grid
   With Enterprise MRG’s Grid functionality, customers can schedule their Web server and other applications to run in distributed and cloud computing environments, and can acquire the appropriate resources to accomplish these jobs. With the 1.2 update, Enterprise MRG Grid can now support the scheduling of KVM-based virtual machines in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, and offers even greater scalability for large-scale cloud deployments.

   Enterprise MRG’s Grid technology is based on the open source Condor project, which was developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Condor 7.4, released in early November, is incorporated in Enterprise MRG 1.2, allowing customers to use some of the latest High Throughput Computing technologies available today, in a fully supported product.

Customers with an Enterprise MRG subscription automatically receive the 1.2 update today via Red Hat Network.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise MRG, visit here.

To learn more about Enterprise MRG, virtualization and cloud computing, join the Red Hat Virtual Experience online event on December 9 and attend our session on Enterprise MRG.

Yesterday I had the honor of attending President Obama’s Jobs and Economic Forum at the White House. The event gathered around 130 leaders from U.S. companies, small business, academia, labor unions and government to talk about job creation and how to jump start the economy as we look to emerge from the global economic recession.

Just this morning the Department of Labor released the latest unemployment rates for November 2009. Unemployment has ballooned to a staggering 10% in the United States. These numbers may seem daunting, and there won’t be any quick fixes, but I see a lot of opportunity for government and business to apply the core concepts of open source to help spur job creation.

Many interesting ideas were discussed for getting people back to work. Things like changes in tax policies to spur hiring, public sector investments in infrastructure, initiatives to encourage lending, and efforts to reduce uncertainty that discourage so many businesses from hiring . . . . just to name a few. These are great ideas, and I’m sure many will be acted upon to help restart job growth.

That said, as the leader of Red Hat, I think I bring a different perspective. As indicated in our recent filings, Red Hat has grown – both revenue and people – and has done so at a double digit pace in the worst recession of modern times. And so, while it is important to restart job growth in stagnant areas of the economy, I think it is just as important to look to approaches that are working to inform our country’s broader economic efforts.

So why has Red Hat thrived throughout the economic downturn? From a product-market perspective the answer is clear. This recession has been a wake-up call for many CIOs, who have been asked to deliver more value with reduced budgets, to look to open source. In the process, they’ve found that not only is open source a cost-effective solution, but it’s also secure, reliable, robust and effective in increasing productivity and meeting mission-critical IT infrastructure needs.

But why have we been able to deliver these benefits in a way that no other competitor can? The simple answer is that Red Hat has leveraged the power of participation to deliver value to our customers that no individual company has matched. The power of participation is real! From Wikipedia and the Human Genome Project to Facebook and Red Hat, many 21st century successes are built around architectures of participation. There is a growing base of academic research and empirical examples: more and more innovation will occur via open networks of participation.

In order to create and sustain real, long-term, high value jobs, we must recognize and harness the power of participation to drive innovation in this country. The suggestions I made yesterday were in the spirit of ensuring that government policies and initiatives foster participation at a national level. Specifically,

1. We must invest in education to address key skills gaps. Three things come to mind:
   • Increase our absolute investments in education and training. There are many, well established vehicles for this.
   • Leverage the power of technology to enhance the learning experience. We must seek ways to leverage the low cost and rich multimedia capabilities of technology to augment traditional education techniques and help capture the imaginations of the new generation.
   • Establish policies to accelerate broad access to learning materials and promote open collaboration among educators in creating, developing and continuously improving course materials and curricula. Explicit support for initiatives like the OpenCourseWare project would be a good start.
2. We must ensure every American has access to the World Wide Web so that each person has the opportunity to participate – be that in software, government, or society in general. Specifically,
   • We need a national broadband policy to make access ubiquitous.
   • We need to ensure equal access and use of the network, i.e. Net Neutrality.
3. We must ensure there are no artificial barriers to collaborative innovation. Specifically, we must reform the patent system as it relates to business methods and software patents. In areas where open networks of collaboration are powerful, impediments like software patents severely limit the innovation we need to create jobs.
4. We must continue to encourage a culture of transparency, openness and collaboration. Red Hat is successful because we directly leverage the knowledge and experiences of our customers and partners and contributors via the open source model. This administration is doing the same with government, and I think we should applaud their efforts. Yesterday was a great example: bringing business, labor, academic, government and non-profit leaders together is a powerful thing. I know there were a few voices who dismissed the session as a “media stunt.” At one time, there were also voices who dismissed Red Hat’s open source model as “good for hobbyists” . . . and now our products power the infrastructure of the New York Stock Exchange. We can do more when we work together. Never underestimate the power of participation.

Red Hat has built a successful, growing S&P 500 business on the power of open source, not just as a development model, but as a business and organizational model. While ours isn’t the only solution, I do believe business, government and society can unlock the value of information and create good, long-term jobs by sharing and working together.

Recently, a number of vendors have come forth stating support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and forked distributions offered by others in the industry. At Red Hat, we know that truly supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not only about support services, but also about the value of the entire Red Hat subscription.

The Red Hat subscription offers access to the latest Red Hat technology, improved features, security updates, hardware and software support and errata fixes to keep your IT infrastructure up-to-date. But, our subscription model is about more than just software. It also offers tested and quality-controlled technology, our growing ecosystem of certified hardware and software, access to Red Hat Network for easy deployment of updates, new releases as they become available over the life of the subscription, expert technical support with multiple service level options from the leader in open source and more.

These subscription benefits do not translate with third-party support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With forked distributions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s valuable hardware and software certifications do not transfer, and without owning the distribution, third parties cannot fully support it through important activities such as the timely release of patches.

We find that enterprises continue to naturally turn to Red Hat for the value of our Red Hat subscription model and support.