The Year in Open Source: IBM-Red Hat, SUSE, Microsoft, More
This year in open source had it all, from big acquisitions to leadership changes and notable product announcements.
December 23, 2019
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In July, IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat was completed, making it the largest software company acquisition in IT history.
This is a big deal, bringing together two of the most prominent companies in their fields with a goal of helping customers solve their cloud, storage, open source and other IT challenges. Both companies have been communicating widely with customers and channel partners to assure them that the new arrangement will be good for technology-hungry enterprises and for the MSPs, VARs, resellers and others that help them build and manage their IT systems. Both companies also insist that Red Hat will maintain its independence and long history of a progressive and successful open-source culture, while increasing the stakes and opportunities for both in the cloud marketplace.
After offering its own flavor of SUSE OpenStack Cloud for several years, SUSE announced in October that it is dropping the OpenStack cloud operating system from its product line as it pivots to focus more strategically on its Linux and other open-source software products.
The decision was part of a top-to-bottom review of the company’s core products and competitive strategy, as well as a reflection of customer demand, according to SUSE. Though the company has ended sales of new OpenStack contracts, it continues to provide SUSE OpenStack support for existing customers through the end of their current contracts, as long as it is needed.
Every day, the amount of open source code being used and created at Microsoft appears to be growing. For Microsoft Azure customers, about half of Azure’s code base today is built using open source, up from about 30% just three years ago.
Brendan Burns, co-founder of the Kubernetes container orchestration system, sat down with Channel Futures in June and said that he believes in this direction for the company. Although Microsoft is mostly known as a proprietary software company, over the last five to 10 years it has become much more involved in open source, even being ranked among the top 10 contributors list on GitHub. Burns, who serves as the director of engineering for DevOps and containers on Azure and as a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, said the company has always had an engineering culture and has valued engineering as a company, which is a core belief it shares with the open-source community.
In July, Melissa Di Donato, an IT industry veteran who previously served as SAP’s chief operating officer and chief revenue officer, was hired as SUSE’s new CEO.
Di Donato, the first woman to take the company’s helm since SUSE was founded in 1992, replaces Nils Brauckmann, who had led SUSE for the last eight years as CEO, helping the company through its acquisition in March by investment company EQT Partners after being sold by its previous owner, Micro Focus. Her role includes working with the company’s open-source software community, customers, partners and shareholders to push SUSE forward.
After only five years of existence, the Kubernetes container orchestration system has moved from being an internal project at Google to being further developed and expanded to solve a wide range of application delivery and deployment problems for corporate and other business users.
Kubernetes is being used more often today by midsize-to-large businesses to automate the deployment and management of their applications using containers. That growing popularity has also caught the attention of major technology companies, including Oracle and Red Hat, which are working to drive new services and revenue as customers build out their cloud strategies.
A big change in the Kubernetes marketplace is coming in 2020 as VMware gets more involved in Kubernetes with its Project Pacific and Tanzu initiatives, which will essentially see VMware infusing its vSphere virtualization platform with Kubernetes.
Moving to encourage and create standards for edge computing, the Linux Foundation in February created LF Edge, an umbrella group that aims to create and popularize open standards for the adoption and use of IoT, telecom, cloud and other companies.
LF Edge aims to help establish a vendor-neutral, open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud or operating system to enable all edge computing products and services can work well together, regardless of vendor. Edge computing essentially means shortening the distances between devices and the cloud resources that serve them by distributing new resources and software stacks along the path between today’s centralized data centers and the increasingly large number of devices in the field.
Open source and Linux vendor SUSE regained its business independence in March after more than four years of ownership by Micro Focus, putting the company on a new road to driving its own future.
SUSE this time was acquired for $2.5 billion by investment company EQT Partners from Micro Focus, marking the company’s fourth ownership change since 2004. SUSE’s previous owners also include Novell and Attachmate. The deal was seen by analysts as a move that should be beneficial to partners and customers as SUSE gains more control over its path in the IT industry.
Under the latest arrangement, SUSE will operate on its own instead of under a corporate umbrella, while having an investor that will help the company continue its business growth and open-source mission.
Red Hat released its first State of Enterprise Open Source study in April, which found that some 83% of medium-to-large companies are using open source to help run their IT systems.
The benefits of open source, according to the respondents, include modernizing IT infrastructure, developing applications and integrating applications. The report also found that a barrier to further open-source adoption is a shortage of internal IT workers who possess broad open-source skills, especially in the U.S., with some 36 percent of respondents sharing that view. The channel can help solve that problem by providing training, support and other assistance to close those gaps, while also providing help to customers in open-source markets such as containers, data analysis, big data and Kubernetes, Gordon Haff, a Red Hat technology evangelist, told Channel Futures.
For the first time, Red Hat has given its Process Automation suite applied artificial intelligence capabilities which are designed to expand the use of the platform with channel partners and their business customers.
The latest version (7.5) of Red Hat Process Automation, unveiled in November, now lets users incorporate predictive analytics into their decision management applications to build automated systems that help to better interpret and respond to changing market dynamics. The changes allow customers to import and execute predictive models expressed in Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), which lets companies integrate and exchange information between machine-learning platforms where predictive models are created and trained.
Red Hat Process Automation was formerly known as JBoss BPM Suite.
In December, Microsoft reversed an earlier decision and released a technical preview of its Teams chat and communications software that is built to run on Linux clients for the first time.
The new Linux Teams version is the company’s first Office 365 app built to run natively on devices that use the open-source operating system. The Microsoft Teams Linux client preview release comes one year after the company indicated on a Teams user forum post that it had no such plans to offer its rapidly growing collaboration tool on Linux. The decision to develop a Microsoft Teams client for Linux signals that the company anticipates the number of devices that run on the open-source software is poised to rise, which is an intriguing possibility for Linux users.
In December, Microsoft reversed an earlier decision and released a technical preview of its Teams chat and communications software that is built to run on Linux clients for the first time.
The new Linux Teams version is the company’s first Office 365 app built to run natively on devices that use the open-source operating system. The Microsoft Teams Linux client preview release comes one year after the company indicated on a Teams user forum post that it had no such plans to offer its rapidly growing collaboration tool on Linux. The decision to develop a Microsoft Teams client for Linux signals that the company anticipates the number of devices that run on the open-source software is poised to rise, which is an intriguing possibility for Linux users.
It was an intriguing and entertaining year for open-source software in 2019, with news headlines that were all over the map.
In the biggest news, IBM completed its acquisition of open source market leader Red Hat, bringing the two powerhouses together on a new shared path of making their now-connected futures successfully work out for both.
But there was plenty more happening as well, from SUSE dropping OpenStack to Microsoft continuing to deepen its role and relationships in open source with Azure. Then late in the year Microsoft announced that it had released a technical preview of the Linux version of its Teams chat and communications software — after the company said last year that it had no plans to do so. Click through the slideshow above for a glance at these headlines and more in the fascinating world of open source. Where will 2020 take us?
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