Incumbent vendors are typically behind in providing cutting-edge features in network management tools. So, enterprises looking for advanced analytics and network automation will more likely find them in small vendors' products.

More advanced tools are critical to enterprises switching to software-based network management in the data center from a traditional hardware-centric model. Driving the shift are initiatives to move workloads to the cloud and digitize more internal and external operations.

In a study released this month, almost half of the 350 IT professionals surveyed by Enterprise Management Associates said they wanted advanced analytics for anomaly detection and traffic optimization.

Small vendors are addressing the demand by incorporating machine learning in network monitoring tools that search for potential problems. Examples of those vendors include Kentik and Moogsoft.

Besides more comprehensive analytics, enterprises want software that automatically configures, provisions and tests network devices. Those network automation features are vital to improving efficiency and reducing human error and operating expenses.

Gartner recently named three small vendors at the forefront of network automation: BeyondEdge, Intentionet and NetYCE.

Moogsoft is using machine learning to reduce the number of events its network monitoring software flags to engineers. Moogsoft does that by identifying and then hiding multiple activities related to the same problem.

"It really helps streamline" network operations, said Terry Slattery, a network consultant at IT adviser NetCraftsmen.

Kentik, on the other hand, uses machine learning to correlate network traffic flow data generated by switches and routers that support the NetFlow protocol, Slattery said. The process can identify sources of malware or other potential security threats.

Moogsoft and Kentik use machine learning to improve specific features in their products. Vendors have yet to deploy it in broader network operations, which would likely require significant changes in network infrastructure.

Today, companies prefer to work on provisioning, monitoring and making hardware changes on a large scale. After that, they might start adding "smarts" to the network, said Jason Edelman, founder and CTO of consultancy Network to Code.

Gartner also named Network to Code as a small vendor that enterprises should consider. The consultancy's client base includes 30 of the Fortune 500. The company specializes in the use of open source software for managing networks with a variety of vendor devices.

Among Gartner's other small vendors, BeyondEdge was the only one focused on the campus network, where it competes with behemoths like Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Aruba.

BeyondEdge has developed overlay software for Ethernet switching fabrics and passive optical networks. The software lets enterprises create configurations based on business and application policies and then applies them at devices' access points. BeyondEdge sells its vendor-agnostic technology through consumption-based pricing.

BeyondEdge is best suited for organizations that need to provision many ports for different classes of users, Gartner said. Those types of organizations are found in commercial real estate, hospitality, higher education and healthcare.

Intentionet and NetYCE provide tools for data center networks. The former has developed open source-based software that mathematically validates network configurations before deploying them. "This is a new capability in the market and can simultaneously enhance uptime and agility," Gartner said.

NetYCE stands out for developing a straightforward UI that simplifies network configuration change management, network automation and orchestration capabilities, Gartner said.

"It provides a simple way for networking personnel -- who may be novices in automation -- to get up to speed quickly," the analyst firm said.

NetYCE's technology supports hardware from the largest established vendors. The company claims to provide adapters to nonsupported gear within two weeks, Gartner said.

Here is the original post:
Small vendors that stand out in network automation - TechTarget

In conversation with Nick Mailer, founder of The Positive Internet Company, a company thats been in the free and open-source camp ever since its start. We discuss why every desktops a Linux desktop, how the potting shed mentality of the British psyche led to ARMs world domination, and the fact that Positives green credentials are usually an afterthought for many of its clients, but a central tenet of the company.

When it was founded, Positive Internet decided that open source software was the way to go. More than 20 years later, they seem to have been right about that particular choice (although Nicks love of Perl and Vim may be more debatable). The company was founded in the same year a certain American startup opened shop, though Google has, it has to be mentioned, taken a rather different trajectory.

With land dedicated to rewilding projects and a data center in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire (where wind power is pretty much unlimited), Positive Internet now has a global reach, with international offices and clients (including a one R. Stallman Esq.) all over the world. We spent an hour with Nick chewing the fat; this podcast is just some of the conversations many highlights. Enjoy!

The Positive Internet Companys site (contains giraffe imagery):

Home

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Joe Green | @Joe__Hybrid

Joe Green is a writer based in Bristol, UK. He bought his first Mac and dial-up modem in 1992 and has worked in the tech industry since 2000. He writes for a variety of publications and specialises in networking, business process management systems and databases.

Go here to read the rest:
Positivity, Linux, FOSS and potting sheds - Tech Wire Asia

Rami Rahim, CEO, Juniper CEO. Credit: Juniper

CEO plans expansion of Mist artificial intelligence technology into cloud, data centre, Wi-Fi and SD-WAN environments

Print

Read More: Artificial Intelligence data centres enterprise networking Juniper

Juniper intends to spread the gospel of artificial intelligence across enterprise networking in the coming months with new products and services.

The expected moves are acontinuation of a strategythat has been an integral part of Juniper since the company bought wireless and artificial-intelligence software maker Mist in 2019 for $405 million.

Mists cloud-based Wi-Fi Assurance system includes an AI-base engine called Marvis that features dynamic packet capture and machine learning to automatically identify, adapt to and fix network issues.

Wi-Fi Assurance measures performance and service-level metrics to make wireless networks more predictable and reliable, and most recently its features have been expanded to include to include some of Junipers Junos-based wired-switch platforms.

The continued mistifying of Juniper and the increased use of AI were key topics of conversation at the networking vendors recentvirtual AI event.

I think we are just scratching the surface of what we can do with real AI, saidRami Rahim, CEO of Juniper. As we continue to amass ever larger volumes of data wireless and wired it will lead to development of autonomous network actions we can take without human intervention in the cloud or at the edge.

Rahim called AI one of the most overhyped and underhyped technologies across a number of industries but said a variety of activities have come together to make it viable in networking. Those actions include access to ample compute power, the need to mine data as a precious resource 90% of digital data has been generated in the past two years and the open source software movement. AI has been democratised by open source, Rahim said.

Algorithms and data are where the magic is for Juniper, Rahim said. Mist was written during a scale-out era where the back-end was designed to consume mass volumes of data from thousands of Mist elements, and with every additional data point it gathers information that make it smarter.With that data Marvis understands what normal of the network looks like and can in many cases respond without a human intervention required.

Rahim cited some Juniper customers who have seen results with Marvis, including the retailer Gap, which saw a 97% improvement in point-of-sales system errors across its 1,500 stores, and Dartmouth College, which reported solving 75% of its helpdesk tickets with no human intervention.

Dartmouth has a massive wireless network serving a peak of some 28,000 devices concurrently, according to Felix Windt, senior director, Network Services at Dartmouth who spoke during the Juniper event.

AI finds the root cause of some big problems that would take a human many minutes or hours to figure out, and we now have expert systems that can absolutely do that in seconds and do that proactively, Windt said.

We are at a stage now where we are receiving telemetry from our wireless network that comes with actionable items that says, Hey guys, you need to look at the DNS server, or There is a problem with this particular RF in this building, and heres what I would suggest, Windt said

The Juniper/Mist combo means the IT department is not chasing down problems after they are reported, Windt said. But rather we can proactively query specific individuals.You can run requests against Marvis where you can just [ask] who is doing the worst right now, and before [IT techs] have even contacted anybody I can get a list of the top 10 worst performers and look into how I might address their issues.

Looking forward, in the short term, Dartmouth is looking to bring its access layer switches under Marvis to get a handle on its wireless network.

After that I would be looking at AI and security, and longer term I would like to see a sort of federated AI where different vendors AI systems can talk to each other and share information, Windt said.

For Junipers part, it has begun moving some security support into Mist, and continued integration with its hardware lines is what customers will see this year.

In February, Juniper said it would integrate its Security Intelligence (SecIntel) security package to the Mist platform for wireless access. SecIntel includes threat detection software, local and cloud-based security-information and control software with a next-generationfirewallsystem.

With the SecIntel integration, Mist customers can get threat alerts detected by Juniper SRX Series Firewalls and ATP Cloud, letting administrators quickly assess security risks when users and devices connect to wireless networks and take appropriate action such as quarantining devices or enforcing policies, Juniper said.

Another future area of Mist AI integration will includeJunipers SD-WANtechnology, Rahim said.

Customers need the ability to assure solid connectivity across the entire path of network that includes wireless and wired connections and the path traffic takes from a particular location be it at home or the data centre or to the cloud and it would be a natural extension to include theSD-WAN. Thats a work in progress, Rahim said.

IDG News Service

Read More: Artificial Intelligence data centres enterprise networking Juniper

Link:
Juniper's big push: AI in all areas of enterprise networking - Corporate IT

IT executives are increasingly recognizing the importance of open source software as a way to preserve their investment options, reduce vendor lock-in and build more agility into their systems, says Melissa Di Donato, CEO for SUSE.

The ability to tap into a global community of developers who can continually adapt to changing requirements also makes open source a more certain bet during uncertain economic times, she says.

Di Donato shares her perspective on how the open source movement is continuing to grow in importance to enterprise IT decision makers, as well as use cases for ways that government agencies can take greater advantage of open source solutions, in a new FedScoop podcast, underwritten by SUSE Federal:

Why open source software solutions are critical to large scale enterprises

Were seeing customers who want to have choice. When it comes to IT services, they want to be able to put together the best vendors in particular areas. Customers today dont want to be locked into one vendor, one technology, one direction, one set of innovation, says Di Donato.

She outlines three reasons why open source is particularly relevant to federal agencies:

How open source solutions provide agencies greater strategic value

Di Donato maintains that open source solutions are already providing value to agencies in areas such as cybersecurity, high-performance computing and transitioning to cloud-enabled environments.

She cites one key area for defense and civilian agencies that rely on cybersecurity defense mechanisms which use machine learning to discover patterns in data. Specifically, theyre looking to understand how they can speed up discovery for real-time prevention.

Another use case in security is agencies and labs that rely heavily on data driving needs for cryptology, encrypting data both at rest and in motion as well as user data protection. They need to know how to maintain infrastructure in a secure, but in a highly available way, she says.

How federal IT leaders can plan for changes

Agencies also need the agility to respond to roadblocks that arise unexpectedly, Di Donato says.

Roadblocks include, for example, the inability to respond adequately to changing demands, to make informed, data backed-decisions in a timely matter, and the inefficiencies around hybrid-cloud information structures that have limited data integration, Di Donato says.

To respond to these changes, agencies can use open source solutions to ensure they are able to:

Melissa Di Donato is widely regarded in technology circles, having served as chief operating officer at SAP, responsible for worldwide sales and customer satisfaction. And before that, she held leadership positions at Salesforce, IBM, PWC and Oracle.

Listen to the podcast for the full conversation on open source strategies for government agencies. You can hear more coverage of IT Modernization in Government on our FedScoop radio channels on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher and TuneIn.

This podcast was produced by FedScoop and underwritten by SUSE Federal.

The rest is here:
Building resiliency in government services with open source - FedScoop

NEW YORK, May 18, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Grafana Labs is announcing the general availability of Grafana 7.0 with significant enhancements to simplify the development of custom plugins and drastically increase the power, speed and flexibility of visualization. This latest release helps organizations realize their monitoring, visualization and observability goals even faster. Open source Grafana is among the worlds most popular dashboard solutions and boasts more than 550,000 active installations and millions of dashboards in use across the globe. Grafana 7.0 is an accumulation of effort commencing after 6.0 spanning nearing 18,000 commits and 3,699 pull requests from 362 contributors around the world. Additionally, there are hundreds of company, commercial and community data-source plugins and thousands of sample dashboards.

The Grafana 7.0 enhancements heavily focus on helping users and organizations across these key areas:

(Easier to) Connect and Unify All Your Data

(Much More Power and Control to) Process and Transform Your Data

(Faster Ways to) Visualize Your Data Even Traces

Search, Discover, and Secure Your Dashboards with New Enterprise Features

This is truly a major release for us not just a .0 or laundry list of features, but a fundamental, system-wide advancement. With this release, users are going to experience an increase in speed to visualization, along with a host of capabilities that will give them one place, at the user level, to perform simple and complex functions and transformations on their data. For example, by chaining a simple set of point-and-click transformations, users will be able join, filter, re-name, and calculate to get the results they need. Grafana is becoming an ideal tool to speed and ease data transformations and reduce the need to perform disjointed transformations through a variety of query languages outside the dashboard. Torkel degaard, creator of Grafana and co-founder and CGO of Grafana Labs

We believe vendors shouldnt own observability strategies; users and organizations do. We are focused on helping them in their journey through an open and composable framework that can unite an organizations complex environments. With Grafana, they can bring together their own custom APIs, open source metrics like Prometheus or Graphite along with Loki and Elasticsearch for logs, and proprietary systems like Datadog, Splunk, NewRelic, Oracle, and ServiceNow. Raj Dutt, co-founder and CEO of Grafana Labs.

Grafana 7.0 is available immediately for Grafana Cloud customers, through a free 30-day cloud trial, and for download.

Helpful Links

About Grafana LabsGrafana Labs supports organizations monitoring, visualization and observability goals through an open and composable platform built around Grafana, the open source software for beautiful monitoring and metric analytics and visualization. There are now more than 550,000 active installations of Grafana, and the instantly recognizable dashboards have become ubiquitous. Grafana Labs commercial products include Grafana Enterprise, with key features and support for large organizations, and Grafana Cloud, a hosted Grafana-based stack that includes Prometheus and Graphite (for metrics) and Loki (for logs). Today, more than 1,000 customersincluding Bloomberg, eBay, PayPal, and Sonyturn to Grafana Labs to help bring their data together, all through software that is vendor-neutral. Grafana Labs is backed by leading investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lead Edge Capital. Follow Grafana on Twitter at @grafana or visit http://www.grafana.com.

Media ContactCathy WrightOffleash PR for Grafana Labsgrafana@offleashpr.com 650-678-1905

Here is the original post:
Grafana 7.0 Delivers Major Visualization Upgrades and Empowers Users to Unite & Transform Data from All Sources Ranging from Metrics and Logs to...

Security testing has always been an important step in the application development process. Yet, traditional measures often occur too late in the process to effectively find and fix vulnerabilities before causing costly production delays, or worse, putting organizations at risk for potential security breaches.

To minimize security-related costs and risks, testing needs to occur sooner and more frequently throughout the development process. But, how can you accomplish this while keeping pace with growing application development demands?

Looking at automation can help. Development teams have been using automation to streamline manual activities such as build, deployment and functional testing for years now, and it is time security testing joins the mix. By integrating automated security validation into the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, you can catch vulnerabilities sooner, reducing the potential risk and financial impact.

In this article, well look at five ways automated technology tools can help safeguard the CI/CD pipeline: SAST, detecting OSS vulnerabilities, identifying compromising credentials, DAST and verifying cloud infrastructure security.

Your CI pipeline provides a ready-made check-in point to install the following automated security gates and pinpoint vulnerabilities.

SAST provides the earliest check-in opportunity, allowing you to identify potential issues at the coding stage, so you can resolve problems without breaking builds or allowing vulnerabilities to get passed to the final application release.

Commercial solutions such as Checkmarx help to identify hundreds of security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in custom code. You can also leverage many open source linters for your specific platforms to detect various vulnerability patterns that can compromise code security.

Just because the code is secure doesnt mean the entire application is protected. Most applications use a large number of dependencies, or third-party open source software (OSS) components. These may have various security vulnerabilities and put your application at risk.

Tools such as Whitesource Bolt and Black Duck can scan all of your projects, not only to detect OSS components, but also identify and provide fixes for any known vulnerabilities.

Human error is always a security concern, especially when it comes to credentials. Just consider how many times youve heard of developers committing code only to later realize theyd accidentally included a password. These errors can lead to high-cost consequences for organizations.

There are many tools that scan for secrets and credentials that can be accidentally committed to a source code repository. One example is Microsoft Credential Scanner (CredScan). Perform this scan in the PR/CI build to identify the issue as soon as it happens so they can be changed before this becomes a problem.

Once an application is deployed, you can continue to scan for vulnerabilities through the following automated continuous delivery pipeline capabilities.

Unlike SAST, which looks for potential security vulnerabilities by examining an application from the insideat the source codeDynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) looks at the application while it is running to identify any potential vulnerabilities that a hacker could exploit.

OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an open source tool for performing pen testing on web applications and APIs. Pen testing helps ensure that there are no security vulnerabilities hackers can manipulate. It can be installed as a client application or come configured on a docker container. OWASP ZAP scans can be incorporated into your pipeline to check every deployment for security vulnerabilities.

Finally, in addition to validating the application, the infrastructure should be validated to check for vulnerabilities. When using a public cloud, deploying the application and shared infrastructure is easy, so its important to validate that everything has been done securely.

Each public cloud includes tools to help verify that the infrastructure has been provisioned securely. APIs can be leveraged to check immediately after deployment in lower environments to help ensure any infrastructure security issues are caught before they get to production. Additionally, tools such as InSpec provide compliance-as-code to enforce the intent of provisioned infrastructure is always being met.

Enabling continuous security validation through the CI/CD pipeline can help fortify applications against an expanding array of security threats that can lead to significantly higher costs and exposure. At the same time, automation tools can provide added layers of protection while meeting the organization application development demands.

More:
5 Ways to Detect Application Security Vulnerabilities Sooner to Reduce Costs and Risk - DevOps.com

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has launched a new spin-off: Swat.engineering. The new start-up -the 25th in CWIs history- focuses on domain specific software engineering and serves clients in the field of finance, health and embedded. The first part of the companys name refers to the Software Analysis and Transformation (SWAT) research group at CWI, from which the new enterprise emerged. Davy Landman (CEO): We are close to the action, because of our strong connection with the SWAT research group, which allows us to intertwine new scientific insights into our advice extremely fast.

Software: expensive to develop and hard to change

Swat.engineering helps companies to gain control over software development and maintenance with help of domain modelling and automated software analysis and transformation. Organisations are getting more and more dependent of software. It is difficult to align software with changing business purposes, because of the complexity of business processes and increasing IT costs. This makes the adaptation of software time-consuming and sensitive to errors. This is caused by inefficient knowledge exchange between domain experts and IT developers. Rising maintenance costs are also caused by a high level of complexity of critical software. Developers have to search continuously in order to understand the code and this makes changes more expensive.

More efficient communication between business experts and IT developers

Swat.engineering models domain knowledge with a tailormade domain-specific programming language. This makes communication between business experts and IT departments more efficient. Low-code systems try to reach the same goal, but Swat.engineering's solution is easier to integrate into existing systems and is better adaptable to specific demands. This new language is not only understandable for experts from the business, but also for auditors and software developers.

Landman: For a project in the financial business we have developed a domain specific language to describe financial systems together with domain experts. From this description software has been generated that fits into the existing software architecture. This approach is suitable for every technique (database, network), programming language and environment. We use open source software in order to prevent lock-in.

Swat.engineering specializes in extracting knowledge from existing source code and gives organizations a grip on their software in this way. This can be domain knowledge for modeling or knowledge to (partly) modernize the source code automatically. New company and system-specific tools are being developed for this together with the client. Large overdue maintenance can be drastically accelerated by performing this in steps semi-automatically.

Founding spin-off companies such as Swat.engineering is an important tool for CWI to bring knowledge and technology to the market. Swat.engineering is the 25th spin-off company of CWI since the founding of computer manufacturer Electrologica in 1956. Other recent spin-offs are: Stokhos (2016), MonetDB Solutions (2013), Spinque (2010) and VectorWise (2008, adopted by Actian in 2011).

Swat.engineering

Swat.engineering has been founded by a team of very experience researchers from CWIs SWAT research group: Paul Klint, Davy Landman and Jurgen Vinju. They have made their mark in software research. Klint is one of the founders of domain specific languages worldwide. A more detailed company profile can be found here.

Dutch version of news item

Read this article:
CWI's 25th spin-off develops software of the future - Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)

2h | Natalie Bannerman

Capacity shares 5 key finance stories from around the world making headlines today!

Colt reduces latency on PrizmNet routes

Colt Technology Services has made further latency reductions on PrizmNet routes in Europe, to ensure ultra-low latencies for the Capital Markets.

Colt has now implemented next-generation Arista7130 Layer1 switches within the PrizmNet European core to provide even lower latency connectivity between the hubs and exchanges in London, Frankfurt, Zurich and Madrid.

"We know that every microsecond counts for Capital Markets participants. The latency reductions on these important European routes will help our PrizmNet customers improve their trading performance and execution success rates," says Matthew Reinholds, head of capital markets for the US and Europe, Colt.

"Colt will continue to monitor the market and make infrastructure investments to ensure we keep delivering the best possible latencies and performance for the Capital Markets community."

South Reach Networks acquires Florida Fiber and Colo Assets of Resurgence

South Reach Networks has acquired the Florida-based fibre and colocation assets of Resurgence Infrastructure Group (Resurgence).

The acquisition includes over 120,000 fibre miles of available capacity fromJacksonvilletoMiami, five neutral colocation facilities, key metro networks inJacksonvilleandBoca Raton, and direct fibre connectivity to multiple subsea cable landing stations and data centres throughout the state.

"We're thrilled to announce this latest acquisition of a key strategic asset, which complements our existing footprint inMiamiwith reach toLatin Americaand global markets," said industry vetran Michael Sevret.

"This asset bolsters South Reach Network's growing network-centric thesis. The acquired business will be quickly integrated, with resilient connectivity, into our existing platform, adding 10 new Tier 1 points of presence (PoPs) and over 350 route miles to our footprint.

Virgin Media Business partners 8x8 for cloud in the UK

Virgin Media Business has announced a partnership with 8x8 for accelerated cloud communications in the UK.

Under the terms of the agreement, Virgin Media Business will be able to extend its voice and unified comms portfolio, providing its customers with a new cloud-based and fully-integrated communications tools from 8x8 covering voice, video, chat and contact centre solutions.

This partnership provides our customers with a globally leading cloud communication platform that offers a step change in how businesses communicate with their customers and colleagues, said Andrew Halliwell, product director at Virgin Media Business.

8x8 is a truly disruptive business whose relentless customer focus and innovative products make them a natural partner for Virgin Media Business.

ZTE validates industrys first 5G carrier aggregation on 700MHz and 4.9GHz

ZTE has completed the validation of 5G carrier aggregation on 700MHz and 4.9GHz frequency bands in Shenzhen, China.

This validation has further enhanced the 700MHz + 4.9GHz dual-band networking solution, fully facilitating the next phase of commercial construction on 700MHz.

Leveraging ZTE's commercial 5G wireless base station and the latest 5G core network equipment, this validation has employed ZTE's latest 5G test terminal system to achieve a system downlink data throughput up to 1.68Gbps.

By effectively aggregating the dual-carrier resources at different frequencies on 700MHz and 4.9GHz, the service support capability of the dual-band networking solution better than that of 5G NR 100MHz, thereby addressing the service competition problem of the future commercial use on 700MHz.

Arista partners Microsoft for open networking with SONiC

Arista Networks has strengthened its commitment to open network software with the introduction of Arista switches powered by SONiC (software for open networking in the cloud).

This latest initiative is another proof point of the continued long-term partnership between Arista and Microsoft on our mutual cloud networking journey, said Dave Maltz, distinguished engineer at Microsoft.

This expansion of SONiC support allows customers to take advantage of Aristas broad platform portfolio, high quality system design, as well as global support allowing for broader adoption of cloud networking,

Enabled by a new Arista Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) offering, customers now have the flexibility to deploy SONiC software on Arista switching platforms, combining the benefits of open source software with Arista EOS for open, high performance, highly available networks.

Arista has a long history of collaboration and support for open networking with major contributions to SONiC. Arista switches Powered by SONiC brings open software choices for on-premise enterprise data centres.

We are helping customers realise their cloud networking transformation around resilience, automation and modern analytics backed by world class engineering and support. Added Anshul Sadana, chief operating officer at Arista Networks.

Read the rest here:
Five things to watch May 19: Virgin Media Business partners 8x8 for cloud in the UK, Colt reduces latency on PrizmNet routes, and South Reach Networks...

Last July, Melissa Di Donato took the reins of the German cloud infrastructure company SUSE. Around the same time, IBM acquired SUSE's biggest rival Red Hat in a $34 billion deal.

That sale combined with the likelihood of open source thriving during the coronavirus crisis is increasing Di Donato's confidence in the company.

While that might sound counterintuitive its fiercest competitor now has a larger war chest during an economic downturn Di Donato feels that the opportunity has never been greater. She put it bluntly: "Our biggest competitor was taken out by IBM."

Meanwhile, downturns make open source software more attractive to businesses looking for cost savings, she argued.

"We provide a free alternative that alleviates the need to invest in proprietary software," she told Business Insider, "And [we] still maintain the high level of innovation delivered through our community."

The nearly 30-year-old SUSE builds open source Linux and cloud infrastructure products and then charges business customers for add-ons like support. Its offerings are similar to those of Red Hat, although SUSE launched a year before its biggest rival did.

Di Donato's belief that SUSE is particularly well-suited to weather the crisis has outside support, too: Experts say that opens source software companies often grow stronger during economic downturns and that open source software contributions may also rise as more people stay home,

"The opportunity is endless," Di Donato said.

Di Donato's assertion that Red Hat's sale to IBM is akin to being "taken out," comes perhaps from her company's own history. SUSE's has been shuffled between different owners through a series of acquisitions over the years, from Novell to The Attachmate Group to Micro Focus. In 2019, Micro Focus sold SUSE to the private equity firm EQT for $2.5 billion, which made it an independent company once again.

Red Hat now has the resources and backing of its massive parent company but, at the same time,developers may feel less certain about its direction now that it's under IBM's umbrella. (Red Hat didn't not respond to a request for comment.)

If IBM hijacked Red Hat's services, it "would be doing their customers a huge disservice," Di Donato says.

Interestingly, IBM is one of SUSE's earliest and biggest partners, which hasn't shifted since it bought its competitor. They both still pay for each other's services.

"We're a big portion of their business that they're not willing to give up," she said. "While they do own Red Hat, the mantra with IBM always remains open and agnostic."

Beyond SUSE, Di Donato has decades of experience in enterprise tech. She was chief revenue officer of SAP's cloud portfolio and a veteran of Salesforce, IBM, PwC, and Oracle too. Notably, she's spent the bulk of her career in proprietary software instead of open source. Because of her experience, she said that she also knows how to communicate with giant customers and partners like SAP, Microsoft, and Dell.

"I come to this role with a very different perspective," Di Donato said. "The most important part of our business is our customers. Everything that we do pivots around customer business requirements."

While the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak around the world started to really become apparent in late February and March, Di Donato says it's been on her mind since December because SUSE has a large workforce in China.

Ultimately, the company's corresponding adjustments haven't felt too dramatic because nearly 40% of its employees were working from hom even prior to the pandemic. That's not uncommon for open source companies.

"We like to think open source is quite ahead of the curve in adopting the workforce of the future: We embrace this new way of working together," Di Donato said. "It's normal for us to be communicating this way online. We have no IP to hide within our company. It's openly shared across all our competitors in the open source Linux world that we collaborate on together."

Got a tip?Contact this reporter via email atrmchan@businessinsider.com, Signal at646.376.6106,Telegram at @rosaliechan, orTwitter DM at@rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request.

Link:
SUSE CEO on how it will take on IBM's Red Hat, grow through recession - Business Insider

The Open Networking Foundation on Thursday announced the release of the COMAC (Converged Multi-Access and Core) Reference Design (RD) specification.

In parallel, the COMAC exemplar platform (open source software) was released and deployed by T-Mobile Poland. This specification was authored by network operators AT&T, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Google, Turk Telecom/Netsia.

COMAC is a platform for converging 5G and LTE mobile networks together with broadband access networks, and this RD joins ONFs portfolio of RD specifications for broadband (SEBA), optical (ODTN), SDN fabric (Trellis) and Next-Generation SDN. COMAC, like all ONF RDs, is authored by operators who have committed to deploying open source solutions based on the specification.

The exemplar platform open source software release of COMAC v1.0 was released in late 2019, and went into deployment by T-Mobile Poland in early 2020.

Oguz Sunay, VP R&D, Mobility, ONFWith COMAC, ONFs operator partners are beginning to drive a sea of change and substantial advancement towards combining and converging what were once wholly separate networks: the network edge, RAN and operator core.

Read the original post:
Open Networking Foundation Releases Reference Design for Converged Multi-Access and Core - The Fast Mode