Tag Archive for Red Hat

Please Take Lotus Notes

Please Take Lotus NotesIn a move to free up some cash and make room for its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Inc. (RHT), IBM (IBM) is selling off its enterprise software business for $1.8 billion to HCL Technologies.

Please Take NotesHCL Technologies is global services company valued at $8 billion. India-based HCL operates out of 43 countries, serving the financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, media, publishing, entertainment, retail, and other industries.

Lotus Notes

The sale includes most of IBM’s enterprise business, including Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software, network management software Tivoli, and other titles. Lotus Notes was developed by Mitch Kapor in 1989 and was a pioneering enterprise software tool that swept the market with features such as email and collaboration workspaces, that we now take for granted.

Lotus 1-2-3 for DOSLotus, founded in 1982, rose to fame in 1983 with the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which drove the popularity of freshly minted IBM PC. IBM took over Lotus for the then astounding sum of $3.52 billion. IBM looked to the Lotus acquisition to change its white-shirt-and-tie culture to embrace the MTV age and the new Internet.

Lotus Notes and Domino ranked among the top client-server groupware and email systems in the 1990s, competing head-on against Microsoft Exchange. While Microsoft successfully migrated Exchange to Office 365 in the cloud, Notes and Domino largely missed the cloud era.

Lotus NotesBig Blue acquired Tivoli for $743 million in 1996. It ranked among the leading IT management software providers, competing against CA Technologies, BMC, and HP in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each of those companies stumbled in recent years — opening the door for ServiceNow to disrupt major portions of the market.

The IBM world-view

The HCL deal highlights IBM’s failure to navigate the shift from client-server to SaaS. Lotus Notes stayed a client-server system and lost business to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Now that the business has been lost, IBM is moving in a different direction. Older software like Lotus Notes and Domino don’t really play a role in the new IBM world-view. One IBM solution provider told CRN,I can understand getting rid of Lotus Notes and Domino Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps are killing the hell out of Lotus Notes.

In addition to Lotus Notes, Domino, and Tivoli, the IBM Software asset sale to HCL includes:

  • IBM Appscan, a security-focused application for identifying and managing vulnerabilities in mission-critical applications;
  • IBM BigFix endpoint management and security software;
  • IBM Unica, a cloud-based enterprise marketing automation software; and
  • IBM WebSphere Commerce, an omnichannel commerce platform for B2C and B2B organizations.

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While I am the PM on our move off of Notes to SaaS products like O365, every once in a while I find myself saying that Notes worked well. But then I remember that it is overly complex and proprietary. The client software is huge and bloated and lacks a simple client.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Follow the Open Source Money

 Matt Asay at Infoworld recently pointed out some interesting data on who really contributes to open source. Wikipedia, the most well-known open-source project, defines open-source software as software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities include individual programmers as well as large companies.

Open sourceAdobe developer Fil Maj used the GitHub REST API to pull public profile information from GitHub users. The REST API is a low-bandwidth protocol used on the internet that allows two software programs to communicate with each other. Using the API, Mr. Maj collected the company field from all 2,060,011 GitHub user profiles who were active in 2017 (“active” meaning ten or more commits to public projects). Using that data, Mr. Maj was able to pull the total number of corporate contributors to GitHub, with results that might surprise you.

Here are the ranking of GitHub contributors, with their total number of employees actively contributing to open source projects on GitHub:

RankCompanyEmployees Contributing
1Microsoft4,550
2Google2,267
3Red Hat2,027
4IBM1,813
5Intel1,314
6Amazon.com881
7SAP747
8ThoughtWorks739
9Alibaba694
10GitHub676
11Facebook619
12Tencent605
13Pivotal591
14EPAM Systems585
15Baidu584
16Mozilla469
17Oracle455
18Unity Technologies414
19Uber388
20Yandex351
21Shopify345
22LinkedIn343
23Suse325
24ESRI324
25Apple292
26Salesforce.com291
27VMware271
28Adobe Systems270
29Andela259
30Cisco Systems233

The author points out, this is not a perfect measure, but it is a much richer, more accurate data set for figuring out total contributors for any company. Even with that caveat in mind, we end up with many more corporate open source contributors than previous data suggested.

Microsoft’s contributions to open source

Microsoft's contributions to open sourceThe new data shows Microsoft (MSFT) is the number 1 open source contributor. Redmond has twice the number of contributors compared to its next nearest competitor. Remember Steve Ballmer‘s developers! developers! developers! meltdown?  For those of us that were around when Mr. Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO called open source as a “cancer” and “anti-American,” this is a remarkable change of heart for MSFT.

Red Hat

Red Hat (RHT) Mr. Maj’s data puts the open source leader among the top contributors. Red Hat has dramatically fewer engineers on its payroll than Google (GOOG) or Microsoft. As such, it’s doubly impressive that Red Hat would place so highly. Pretty much every engineer in the company works on open-source projects.

Amazon

 

Amazon logoAmazon (AMZN) Often considered an open source ne’er-do-well, Amazon comes in at No. 6 in the rankings. AMZN has nearly 900 open source contributors on staff. The article points out that Amazon has perhaps not publicly led the open source effort in the same way as Google and Microsoft have, but it remains a strong contributor to the projects that feed its developer community.

China is a net consumer of open source

Chinese companies like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba, which have long been perceived to be net consumers of open source, actually contribute quite a bit according to the new data.

Legacy firms

Legacy firms like Intel (INTC), Oracle (ORCL), Adobe (ADBE), and Cisco (CSCO) rank among the top 30 open source contributors reports InfoWorld.

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Color me suspicious, but have these firms really embraced open source. Have they just adapted their business model to usurp elements of open source to lay their proprietary code on top of it? This saves them the bother of writing new code and yet they can charge proprietary costs for software where they have reduced their development costs.

Tom Brady hanging high fiveAfter all, numbers don’t lie. Stats say that in 2014, half of the companies said they use open source in their product. Just one year later, the number grew to 78%. Consequently, as long as open source continues to enjoy its place in the sun, we should expect the Microsoft-open source bromance to continue.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Linux Turns 25

Linux Turns 25Linus Torvalds released the first Linux operating system kernel on Oct. 5, 1991. On Oct. 6, 1991, Torvalds began arguing with volunteer developers who would go on to make Linux an open-source powerhouse and eventually a household name. Today the Linux community is upwards of 86 million users strong.

Linux Turns 25As part of celebrations to mark Linux’s 25th birthday the Linux Foundation has published its annual Linux Kernel Development Report (PDF reg required). According to the Register, the report concludes that Linux is in great shape, “There may be no other examples of such a large, common resource being supported by such a large group of independent actors in such a collaborative way.”

The independent actors have a lot to collaborate on. The report notes that the first versions of the Linux kernel comprised about 10,000 lines of code. Now it’s nearing 22 million and growing at a rate of 4,600 lines a day.

Wall StreetWhile Linux may have started out as a hobby OS, that changed in the early 2000s. At the turn of the century, Wall Street banks demanded Linux support for their enterprise application servers says Tech News World.

“That was a moment that broke down resistance to Linux in the big IT vendors like BEA, IBM, and Oracle (ORCL). That hole in the dam was the start of a flood,” said Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji. “Today Linux is the home of operating system innovation.

Linux user and open source advocateAporeto Virtualization Expert Stefano Stabellini, who has been a Linux user and open source advocate since the 1990s explained the transition. “… back when I started with Linux in the ’90s … [companies] did not understand it. They thought that open source was unsustainable, and Linux was niche and hobbyist.” He says that now everything has changed. Every company has an open source strategy now. “Microsoft (MSFT) was the biggest foe and now is a strong ally. Linux is the most widely adopted operating system of all times.

Dice points out that the most active contributors to the growth of Linux have included (in descending order) Intel (INTC), Red Hat, Linaro, Samsung (005930), SUSE, IBM (IBM), and various corporate consultants. Google (GOOG), AMD (AMD), and Texas Instruments (TXN) also ranked in the top 15.

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So my first pass at Linux was Red Hat Linux 5.0. when Novell bought into Linux. Yeap I was a Novell CNE 5 way back in the day.

The last couple of projects I have been involved with have used Linux and not Windows, CMS, IVR, PAFW’s, and storage.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Schools Face RansomWare Risk

More than 2,000 machines at K12 schools are infected with a backdoor in unpatched versions of JBoss that could be used at any moment to install ransomware such as Samsam. TargetTech defines ransomware as malware designed for data kidnapping, an exploit in which the attacker encrypts the victim’s data and demands payment in Bitcoins for the decryption key.

JBossRansomware has typically been spread through drive-by downloads or spam emails with malicious attachments. One of the latest victims of Samsam was MedStar Health, a not-for-profit organization that runs 10 hospitals in the Washington, D.C., area.

PCWorld reports that the Cisco (CSCO) Talos threat-intelligence organization, announced that roughly 3.2 million machines worldwide are at risk. The article says that many of those already infected run Follett’s Destiny library-management software, used by K12 schools worldwide. According to Cisco, Follett responded quickly to the vulnerability,” Follett identified the issue and immediately took actions to address and close the vulnerability”.

BitcoinIn a presser, Follett offers patches for systems running version 9.0 to 13.5 of its software and says it will help remove any backdoors. The author states that Follett technical support staff will reach out to customers found to have suspicious files on their systems. Follett even offers SNORT detection rules on the presser page.

Snort is a highly regarded open-source, freeware network monitoring tool that detects attack methods, including denial of service, buffer overflow, CGI attacks, stealth port scans, and SMB probes. When suspicious behavior is detected, Snort sends a real-time alert to Syslog, a separate ‘alerts’ file, or to a pop-up window.

JBoss the vulnerable underlying system is described as an open-source Red Hat product that serves as an application server written in Java that can host business components developed in Java. Essentially, JBOSS is an open source implementation of J2EE that relies on the Enterprise JavaBeans specification for functionality.

PCWorld reports that compromised JBoss servers typically contain more than one Web shell. Talos advises that it is important to check the contents of a server’s jobs status page. “This implies that many of these systems have been compromised several times by different actors,” the company said.

BackupWeb shells are scripts that indicate an attacker has already compromised a server and can remotely control it. The list of those associated with this exploit is listed in Talos’s blog post.

Companies that find a Web shell installed should begin by removing external access to the server, Talos said in the article. The security firm recommends quick action.

Ideally, you would also re-image the system and install updated versions of the software … If for some reason you are unable to rebuild completely, the next best option would be to restore from a backup prior to the compromise and then upgrade the server to a non-vulnerable version before returning it to production.

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I have worked with a number of customers on their library automation projects. The cost of these systems is as usual in the data. There is a great deal of time and effort that goes into creating the proper MARC records, especially for books that are out of print and kiddie books. If these files get locked up by ransomware, the system is useless and expensive to replace.

K12 schools are notoriously cheap, but the advice is the same as always,

  1. Keep your software UP TO DATE
  2. Use a real virus scanner on your servers and administrative stations
  3. Back-Up – Back-Up – Back-Up – With a good backup, you can just blow the machine away, re-install and restore the data. and be back in business.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Another Cloud Goes Bust

Another Cloud Goes BustOn April Fools day, another cloud provider closed down without any warning. FierceBigData reports that OpenStack cloud vendor Nebula ceased operations on April 01, 2015 without ever a heads-up.

shut-down operations without ever a heads-upThe firm, founded in 2011 by former NASA CTO, Chris Kemp, appeared to have it under control. According to CSC, they seemed to have customers for its Nebula Cloud Controller, an appliance that integrated up to forty x86 white-box servers into a turnkey OpenStack cloud. Customers of Nebula have included Lockheed Martin, Shutterfly, Sandia National Laboratories, and Genentech.

The company also had a fat war-chest of almost $40 million from top-tier VCs. Silicon Angle reports that Nebula managed to burn $38.5 million in venture capital prior to its closure, from investors including Webb Investment Network, Comcast Ventures, Scott McNealy, William Hearts II, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Highland Capital Partners, and others.

Despite its well-stocked war-chest, customer support ended immediately. The defunct company told its former customers to turn to “OpenStack products from vendors including Red HatIBM (IBM), HP (HPQ) and others.”

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burned $38.5 million in venture capital prior to its closureThe stability of cloud providers is really questionable. I have covered other cloud provider implosions; MegaCloud, Nirvanix, and Code Spaces.

In the end, it is as simple as the author says the moral of the story is “that you should look very carefully at your partners … you must be able to count on your system integrator, value-added reseller, whoever, to be there when you need them. 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedInFacebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.