“Red Hat's Virtual Summit Crowds Hint at Future Conference Models - LinuxInsider.com” plus 4 more |
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| Red Hat's Virtual Summit Crowds Hint at Future Conference Models - LinuxInsider.com Posted: 07 May 2020 03:52 AM PDT  In what could be a trial run for more of the same, Red Hat last week held a first-ever virtual technical summit to spread the word about its latest cloud tech offerings. CEO Paul Cormier welcomed online viewers to the conference, which attracted more than 80,000 virtual attendees. The company made several key announcements during the online gathering and highlighted customer innovations around Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and next-generation computing. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous tech events around the world have been canceled, postponed or turned into online-only events. This year's Red Hat Summit was the biggest yet, according to Cormier. Cormier's keynote focused on the history of open source, virtualization, and hybrid and cloud technologies. While all of those concepts began as ideas, they now are integrated deeply into our daily lives, he said, especially hybrid cloud. One of his prevailing themes was the role innovation plays in the operations of tech companies. Cormier emphasized Red Hat's pursuit of innovation in the use of hybrid technology, which he said is essential in order to scale. To that end, he detailed the growing partnerships with industry leaders including Ford Motor Company, Verizon, Intel, Microsoft and Credit Suisse. "Hybrid requires a common development, operations, security and automation environment. This is essential in order to scale. Hybrid isn't a trend. It's a strategic imperative," he said. Innovation Is KeyRed Hat made three major announcements during a virtual panel discussion: the company's latest OpenShift 4.4 release, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, and OpenShift virtualization. All three announcements focused primarily on hybrid cloud, which garners about 31 percent of Red Hat's customer base. OpenShift 4.4 is the latest release of Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform. Based on Kubernetes 1.17, it features a developer-focused view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads. It also provides monitoring integration for Red Hat operators along with cost management for financial planning associated with specific applications in the hybrid cloud. OpenShift 4.4 brings new capabilities that include pipeline support, new infrastructure functionality on HAProxy and DNS, and improved developer experience use cases, according to Matt Hicks, executive vice president of product and technologies at Red Hat. The new features enable serverless use, and the general path and foundation Red Hat is building on with Linux and Kubernetes. Red Hat announced its Advanced Cluster Management platform for Kubernetes to make it easier to run cloud-native applications at a large scale. The platform enables organizations to manage their Kubernetes clusters with consistency across the hybrid cloud. It works with Red Hat OpenShift deployed on-premises, on bare metal, and on major public cloud providers to native clusters from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Red Hat's third opening day announcement was the availability of OpenShift virtualization — a new feature built from the KubeVirt community project. The virtualization feature enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes, helping eliminate the workflow and development silos that typically exist between traditional and cloud-native application stacks, explained Joe Fernandes, Red Hat's vice president for products, in the cloud platforms business unit. OpenShift virtualization makes it easier to migrate and modernize existing applications and services on the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, he added. Broader Demographic ReachedMoving the event from physical to virtual was a success, said Leigh Day, vice president for marketing communications and brand at Red Hat. It allowed event organizers to reach a much broader demographic than ever before. "By the end of the event, we had more than 82,000 people registered and 56,000 attendees," she told TechNewsWorld. Without the usual travel costs and time constraints, the conference opened up a lot of opportunities for creative interaction between attendees and Red Hatters from around the globe. The virtual event also drew more customers and partners to viewing sessions than ever before because there were no physical space limitations. Furthermore, with an increase in attendees, Red Hat was able to gather more feedback so it can build even stronger events in the future, Day noted. Door-Opening FeatTo say that the virtual summit was a huge success could be an understatement. Turning a physical event with an expected 10,000 attendees to a virtual event in less than two months was not easy, said Day. "The engagement within the environment has to be one of the most notable successes of the Red Hat Virtual Summit 2020," she said. The virtual event had more than 64,000 unique visitors to the "Ask the Expert" and "Chat" sessions. It drew 118,000 unique total views to the General Sessions and more than 322,000 unique visitors to all the session content. "One really unique thing we did was running virtual labs," noted Day. "This is something that has never been done before, and we were able to deploy more than 1,500 labs for customers successfully." Good Overtook BadWith any big event, you are going to expect to see some hiccups. Red Hat's first virtual conference was not the exception. The problems ranged from speakers going over their allotted time to Internet outages in attendees' homes. Still, most of the glitches were minor, and the event staff was ready to handle them, Day said. The bottom line is that Red Hat is not rejecting the notion of holding more virtual events. "This will open the door for more hands-on experiences to be offered more broadly," Day said. Announcement SummariesDuring the second day of the summit conferences, Red Hat provided details about its ongoing developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the course of the changing data center, the open hybrid cloud, and the importance of edge computing. The running theme reinforced Red Hat's belief in the role open source technologies and the communities behind them play in driving new innovations. The role of data in our lives is evolving rapidly to fit the unique challenges tech companies face today, noted Chris Wright, Red Hat's chief technology officer. The amount of amassed data has resulted in rapid changes to the concept of the data center. Managing the cost and complexity of this new architecture at scale is a challenge for any business. It is not just about the quantity of data, but the quality of information derived from it, he said. Red Hat believes an open hybrid cloud is the best way to handle all this data into the future. Similarly, edge computing is vital to delivering the compute and data-intensive parts of the rendering pipeline offloaded to the cloud. To that end, Red Hat is working with the open source community, customers and partners to help organizations looking to accelerate their edge computing strategies. The company also has been working closely with members of its Open Data Hub community in developing a blueprint for building an AI as a Service platform on OpenShift and Red Hat Ceph Storage. Beyond 'Upstream First'Perhaps one of the most significant announcements from Red Hat involved its heightened efforts to go beyond "upstream first" performance. An open hybrid cloud can meet the needs to bring operational models of a cloud. However, no upstream equivalent currently exists for operations. Red Had introduced the Operate First program to assist open source communities and its own cloud products with building operational knowledge directly into software. It hopes to leverage tools such as Ansible and the Operator SDK to glean insights into operational needs as a part of the software development cycle. "When we operate first, we share operational knowledge, which can be as important as the code itself," said Wright. Also, Red Hat last week announced that Vodafone Idea Limited won the Innovator of the Year award. Vodafone Idea builds a Universal Network Cloud that reduces deployment times. Red Hat also announced other 2020 Red Hat Innovation Awards winners: BMW Group, Edenor, Ford and the Argentine Ministry of Health and Social Development. Unproven PathIt is not yet a given how the tech industry in general will respond with future conferences. The actual effectiveness of virtual gatherings is still an uncharted course, suggested Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. In order of effectiveness, tech conferences have three primary values:
"Virtual conferences, so far, don't help with personal networks. Nor are they good at closing sales, but they can be used to generate leads," Enderle told TechNewsWorld. Conferences also convey information well if the presentations can attract and hold an audience. That result depends a lot on the presenters' execution. "The majority of folks don't know how to do virtual conferences well," Enderle noted. Unless conference organizers can find a better way to meet all three critical requirements, the tech industry will go back to physical conferences once it is safe to do so, he predicted. That gives the industry around a year and a half to fix virtual conferences. "Now, given we have no choice at the moment, there is a reasonably good chance someone may figure out how to do this right by the time the mandatory aspect of these things expires," Enderle concluded. What's Next for Red Hat?At this point, company officials do not want to make any predictions for next year. It is still too early to say. However, Red Hat is considering how to leverage what officials learned from this experience to make 2021 even better, Day said. The future could bring a hybrid sort of model that combines digital components with in-person events and meetings. "We know that face-to-face interaction is still so important for customer and partner engagement," said Day. "But we are also learning a lot about the appetite for content and the desire for connection from an expanded global audience. We will want to continue expanding on that in the future."  |
| Posted: 07 May 2020 06:30 AM PDT   |
| Tech Tidbits From Around NH - New Hampshire Business Review Posted: 07 May 2020 08:04 AM PDT  Matt Loede, a print industry sales specialist, has joined Electronics For Imaging Inc. as Eastern regional sales manager for the EFI Display Graphics business, which is based in Londonderry, NH. Loede, who is based in Tampa, Fla., previously worked with Ultralflex Systems Inc. as vice president of sales and marketing. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in New Hampshire has launched a virtual dental care program with The TeleDentists, an in-network provider of virtual dental services from board-licensed dentists. Anthem said the service provides access to dental care 24/7, 365 days a year in the event of an emergency, with virtual exams covered at 100% with no deductibles, copays, paperwork or claims to file through June 30. Anthem said that, while it is encouraging members to seek care from their primary care dentist, The TeleDentists offers consumers an alternative to emergency room or urgent care center visits. Portsmouth-based digital design firm Mad*Pow has launched a design health challenge to "imagine how the world could be made a healthier place through better hygiene behaviors," it says. The company has invited health and design experts, as well as children of all ages, to envision creative solutions for the behaviors that are affecting health. The company says it is looking for imaginative solutions that encourage the healthy behaviors of washing hands, keeping hands off faces, and wearing face masks to maintain health going forward. Prizes include up to $300 in the form of a gift certificate to a local small business of their choice. Deadline to submit is 11:59 p.m. Friday, May 8. For more information click here. Claremont-based IT firm Red River has been awarded a multi-year contract under the state of California's Software Licensing Program for Google Cloud services. It is one of six contractors to be awarded the SLP contract. SLP, established in January 1994, is a multi-year contract that helps California's state agencies procure Google's software, software maintenance and technical support. Red River is an authorized reseller of Google Cloud Platform and G Suite. The four members of New Hampshire's congressional delegation – U.S. Sens. Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen and U.S. Reps. Annie Kuster and Chris Pappas – have urged the Federal Communications Commission to work directly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the millions of Americans who are now eligible for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) or Medicaid because they lost their jobs or lost income know that they are also eligible for the FCC's Lifeline program. Lifeline is the primary federal program charged with helping low-income families obtain broadband and telephone services.  |
| IBM Launches Cloud Satellite to the Edge - SDxCentral Posted: 06 May 2020 01:33 PM PDT   |
| Google Cloud, ATSC 3.0, new CTO all feature in packed SynaMEDIA Day - Rethink Research Posted: 07 May 2020 08:04 AM PDT Synamedia's virtual press event this week was the blink-and-you'll-miss-it showcase we have come to expect from a company so successfully turning legacy to advantage in its new clothes. Video compression was the star of the show, making investments we have detailed in a separate story, while SynaMEDIA Day itself provided more detail on a slew of recent PR activity, including the recently inked partnership with Google Cloud – which initially only added to the confusion. Elaborating on last week's plan to expand its video network portfolio with new OTT as-a-service offerings via Google Cloud, Synamedia's Sabine Bravo, VP of Business Development, said, "We are cloud-agnostic, however, moving forward we need to make sure models work so we need to partner…  |
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