Red Hat outlines vision to help enterprise IT take ‘mobile first’ from hype to reality

Red Hat, Inc., provider of open source solutions, has announced its vision to help organisations succeed in the 'mobile-first' economy. Customers can take advantage of Red Hat's experience in enterprise IT, and its portfolio of enterprise-grade open source technologies – including mobile capabilities from the recent acquisition of FeedHenry – to overcome their mobility challenges.

Red Hat reports that mobility is increasingly becoming a top priority for business as a means to drive innovation and streamline operational efficiency; however, it is also creating demand for faster and continuous development cycles that challenge traditional IT infrastructure and development methodologies. To become mobile-centric, enterprises must evolve in a way that supports both the agility of new mobile initiatives and stability of core IT.

In response, Red Hat is focusing its enterprise mobility vision on four areas: platform architecture, developer experience, technology integration, and collaboration in two-track IT environments.

• Platform architecture: The public Cloud or private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)-based architecture of the Red Hat mobile platform facilitates agile development and DevOps processes, leverages RESTful APIs and microservices, and accelerates time-to-deployment to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

• Developer experience: A developer-centric approach that embraces modern toolchains, collaboration, and continuous development and integration allows organisations to use existing IT skillsets for new mobile initiatives.

• Technology integration: Simplified integration of the platform with other enterprise middleware components, based upon a common REST API architecture, captures and stores new data generated by connected devices to help unlock the value in existing systems of record.

• Collaboration in two-track IT environments: Adopting a two-track IT approach, using mobile as the catalyst for building a 'fast IT' organisation, helps balance agility with stability and fosters greater collaboration and cooperation between the two tracks.

Since accelerating into the enterprise mobile market with the October 2014 acquisition of FeedHenry, the mobile enterprise application platform provider, Red Hat has achieved several notable milestones in its mobile journey, including:

• Release of platform enhancements for mobile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and collaboration.

• Integration of the platform into Red Hat's integrated development environment (IDE), JBoss Developer Studio.

• Deployment of FeedHenry technology as a mobile service in OpenShift as part of Red Hat's xPaaS strategy for Cloud-based application development.

• Customers in industries ranging from manufacturing and transportation to workforce management are using Red Hat mobile technologies to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and extend critical enterprise systems to mobile devices.

• Recognition of the FeedHenry platform as the top Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS) in a sector analysis by GigaOM Research.

Red Hat plans to expand deployment options for the FeedHenry platform and roll out new integrations with the existing Red Hat middleware product portfolio, giving enterprises greater freedom of choice by extending its capabilities across hybrid environments.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president, Application Platforms Business, Red Hat, commented: "The mobile phenomenon has had a profound impact on the way we think and act and consume information in our daily lives. That impact is now rippling throughout enterprise IT as organisations come face-to-face with the reality of doing business in a new 'mobile first' world, where speed and agility must be prioritized without forsaking the stability of core IT. Our vision is to help enterprises evolve in a digital world and provide them with an open and flexible architecture and the technologies that accelerate this transition."

Chris Marsh, principal analyst, Enterprise Mobile App Strategies, 451 Research, commented: "51 per cent of organisations recently surveyed are further increasing their mobile budgets this year. The enabling technologies are falling into place for companies to break out of the way they think about mobile from the silos in which it has traditionally resided, but the process needs to evolve to support this. Over the past year, it has become clearer that traditional waterfall development across the software lifecycle is ill-suited to mobile, and that agile methods are more applicable."