Interviewed by Susan Sharer, EVP, FedHealthIT
We took an opportunity recently to speak with Adam Clater, Chief Architect, North America Public Sector at Red Hat, a company focused on connecting an innovative community of customers, partners, and contributors to deliver an Open Source stack of trusted, high-performing technologies that solve business problems.
What category does your products fall into: Cyber? Interoperability? Open Source? Big Data? Telehealth? BPM?
We are 100% Open Source. When we take a look at innovation today, whether it is media companies, technology companies, the list goes on, the innovation that is being created is mainly in Open Source communities. Think of companies like Amazon, Netflix, Google… The great innovators are all building on Open Source technologies.
Here at Red Hat we are focused on participating in these communities, in contributing code and taking leading edge technologies and making them suit the mission. Lifecycle is something organizations and Government require and our guarantee is that – in the case of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – for 13 years, we’ll be there to support the technology.
Security is a fundamental foundation of evolving technologies and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 has achieved Common Criteria EAL4+, which is critical for National Security IT programs. On another level, we participate deeply with NSA and DISA and have taken all NIST 800-53 configurations required for working with these Agencies and provided all the automation required to implement those controls and made that tooling Open Source.
What are the top 2 Federal Health Agencies you are currently working with?
Red Hat provides the underpinnings and infrastructure for a number of mission critical systems for a number of Federal Healthcare Agencies. Our operating system is adopted as a secure foundation and we also see middleware, Cloud and automation products being used by Agencies that are looking to easily share and integrate data. From processing Medicare claims to disease surveillance and genomics research, Red Hat works with its customers and partners to build products that achieve a variety of Healthcare missions.
What are the trends you are seeing in your space and where is the market going?
Cloud is a huge push of course, but we’re seeing this materializing in different ways. Often the conversation is software as a service (SaaS) and you find that today’s CIO has a portfolio which includes five to ten SaaS applications that align with their business requirements. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of motivation for those SaaS vendors to integrate with one another, nor is there always a clear way to integrate with their back-end systems. Red Hat FUSE helps solve that integration issue, as well as our 3scale product – which focuses on helping IT organizations materialize APIs in a meaningful way, to meet their SLAs and accountability needs as APIs are built and refined.
The other big story in Cloud is of course Infrastructure-as-a-service. With Government consumers frequently blending on-premise private and public Cloud consumption, our goal is to enable customers to make the best multi-Cloud implementation and build portable applications with technologies like OpenStack, CloudForms and OpenShift.
What advice would you give to the system integrators and/or partners that hope to drive new opportunities in this space?
[su_pullquote]The systems integrator or Agency that can leverage the Open Source technology available today to move their business forward will have the edge.[/su_pullquote]We work alongside the system integrator community to give them the access to training and technology long before they actually need it. The systems integrator or Agency that can leverage the Open Source technology available today to move their business forward will have the edge. If you think of it, 10 years ago it would have been inconceivable that the Open Source technology we have today could possibly have existed – but through the power of communities, collaboration and the Open Source movement we’re seeing an explosion of technological capabilities.
Looking forward, Government will be more involved in exposing data for the betterment of the country, of sharing data in a constructive way to move the economy and the business of Government forward. That is an exciting opportunity and challenge we want to be ready for.
About Red Hat: Government Agencies demand performance, transparency and value – exactly what Red Hat and Open Source offer. Red Hat is the standard choice for Linux in Governments worldwide.
Our Cloud, virtualization, storage, platform and service-oriented solutions bring real freedom and collaboration to Federal, state, local, and academic programs. And Red Hat’s worldwide support training and consulting services bring the power of Open Source to your Agency.
We are part of a larger community working together to drive innovation. Learn more at www.redhat.com/government.
