Wearing his bright red shoes, Jim Whitehurst - president and CEO of Red Hat - moves from one side of one of the main stages of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to the other. The economist and engineer by training is the star of the 13th annual Red Hat Summit, the world's largest gathering on open source issues, which brings together some 6,000 people. In the corridors of the place, you can see from businessmen who paid the US$ 1,500 pass for the three days of conferences to tekkies who wear tattoos with the company's logo because they identify with this model of software development.
"Planning, as we know it, is dead," says Whitehurst. "In a world that moves so quickly, plans are obsolete before they've even been completed. Instead of prescribing activities and figuring out where the future is, you need to create a context for individuals to try things, learn, and quickly solve problems. Open source provides a different model: 'try, learn and modify'," says the speaker, often asked by companies to give talks on digital transformation.
To showcase the benefits of this model, Whitehurst invites to the stage three Red Hat customers who relied on open source to help them innovate and achieve the speed of operation they needed.
The first is the Government of the State of Jalisco, Mexico, which reduced the wait from days to hours for its citizens' online requests (from tax information to health care). The second case is the Canadian province of British Columbia, where government officials developed two applications that allow drivers to see if roads are open and safe. The third is "myResponder," an app powered by the Singapore government to alert the nearest trained personnel if someone has suffered a heart attack and needs assistance.
Despite being one of the most important technology firms in the world, Red Hat is not as well known as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard or IBM. The reason? It does not sell mass consumer products -such as laptops or printers-, but works on the idea of finding ways to add value in computing solutions. Under the open source philosophy, it offers software for companies, which are created and perfected by a huge community of developers. Its business consists of charging for a subscription service where its customers receive customized products and solutions, technical support and updates, without having to get involved in the process. Thus, last year alone, the company had a turnover of US$ 2.4 billion, 18% more than in 2015.
In 1994, when Red Hat created its own version of Linux for enterprises, called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), this operating system was regarded with suspicion by its competitors (Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, called it "a cancer"). Today, however, the concept of open source transcends information technology and has positioned itself in governments and areas such as health and banking. In competitive terms, Red Hat leads the way when it comes to presenting effective solutions at low cost: eight of the 10 largest stock exchanges on the planet work with the red hat company. Amadeus, the exchange that handles half of global airline and hotel bookings, runs on open source software provided by the firm.
Cracking the code.
Open source software is software in which a person can access its source code. So you can learn how it's made, modify it, and, most importantly, improve it. Unlike proprietary software -whose license is owned by a company and the only ones who can improve it are its employees-, open source software is driven by a community of hundreds or thousands of people around the world. The latter can adapt it to their needs, fix bugs and find new solutions in a much more accelerated way.
To manage the innovation and speed of open source, you need someone who knows how to manage it. And companies like Red Hat are in charge of bridging the gap between that code and any bank, airline or government that wants access to this level of innovation. Of all the options available to solve the same problem, Red Hat chooses the one it thinks is ready to be used by some company, packages it up and gives them the support to use it. "What you don't have to pay for in open source is the license. That money can be used, for example, by a government to invest in projects," says Sebastián Cao, director of Technology for Latam at Red Hat.
In the last five years, every major technological innovation - from cloud, mobile and big data to advances in areas such as artificial intelligence and autonomous cars - has come from open source. Open source is also ingrained in firms like Facebook, Google, Uber and Airbnb. When they were in a startup state, beginning with their business model, development would have been unfeasible if they had to work with the traditional model of paying for licenses. "A different model, such as open source, made their rapid growth viable. There is an economic issue and also another linked to a philosophy of collaboration and common project to which many of these companies that today are world leaders adhere," says Javier Haltrecht, Marketing Director for Latam at Red Hat.
"You have to learn to tolerate error."
Open source translates into self-organizing systems and associated values such as collaboration and agile innovation. Although more and more executives are asking him how to implement this model in their traditional companies, Whitehurst admits that driving that mindset shift isn't easy: "In this century, almost everything will be automated. The jobs that will stick are the ones that require people to apply judgment, take initiative and be creative," he says. "And our education system, in most of the world, is set up to produce factory workers who follow orders and don't make mistakes. We're creating workers for the 20th century, not the 21st century." According to Cao, the digital transformation of traditional companies will aim to move at the same speed as firms like Google and Facebook: "Their great value is that they build things all the time: things that work and things that don't work. What doesn't work, they tweak it and try it again. They do that at an extremely high continuous speed. The classic organizations of the last 40 years, in banking and in governments, were designed not to fail and to change as little as possible. Now, to compete, they're going to have to do that." "The main organizational challenge is to learn to tolerate error," he concludes. El Mercurio / GDA.
Source: El País
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