Red Hat Summit keynotes: Wednesday, June 18
by Karsten Wade
Starting off this year’s Red Hat Summit was a triplet of keynotes: a Red Hat leader (CEO Jim Whitehurst), a Red Hat partner (Jim Stallings of IBM), and an open culture visionary (Dr. John Halmaka, CIO of Harvard Medical School.) This ordering of keynotes is representative of how the Red Hat commmunity is structured–a balance between enterprise and open communities, with Red Hat in the lead. (These keynotes will be available in their entirety from the Red Hat Summit page.)
Leadership keynote: Jim Whitehurst
Jim Whitehurst focused on how Red Hat enables customers to gain value by entering the open source ecosystem. As examples, he talked about SELinuxAMQP. The Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) was developed internally at JP Morgan for fast messaging. Whitehurst described the visionary CIO of JP Morgan, who realized JP Morgan could improve the code and reduce their maintenance commitment over the long term.
Whitehurst encouraged customers to look at the code they develop internally. “The waste in IT software development is extraordinary,” he said. By bringing that coding effort into the open and building a community around it, enterprises can look at millions in savings.
Visionary keynote: Dr. John Halamka
Continuing the discussion of the value of open culture, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School, talked about healthcare IT. In modern medical IT, he said, “Open and transparent is good, closed and proprietary is bad.” Dr. Halamka’s talk focused on the millions of Eastern Massachusets medical records handled by their Red Hat cluster, placing that in the context of national work on open medical IT standards.
Dr. Halamka works as part of the American Health Information Community (AHIC). One of his main projects with AHIC is improving medical record standards. He describes it as “500 groups working to harmonize standards.” The AHIC defines a number of use cases to drive their work. One of their projects, for example, might be making it possible to get your medical records in a totally portable way.
In Massachusetts, the IT group Dr. Halamka oversees has put this planning into action. Patient records are transmitted on an entirely open source architecture, with edge servers at all the medical providers and payers. As an example, Dr. Halamka pulled up his own record, then joyfully showed his mostly-IT audience the underlying XML source.
By using open standards running on an open source infrastructure, they move patient data wherever it needs to go without delay. In the process, they have saved over $20 million a year by not having licensing and fees for a slower clearinghouse to ship records.
As a call to the innovative open IT audience, Dr. Halamka listed the items that keep him awake at night: Electronic health records for doctors; storage as a utility; e-Prescribing; data sharing for clinical care among a community of caregivers; security; RFID and bar-coding; providing remote decision support; compliance requirements; internal and external websites that provide social tools for end-users; and disaster recovery.
Partner keynote: Jim Stallings
Jim Stallings from IBM presented the partner keynote, which served to bring home some of these open source lessons from the big infrastructure/large enterprise/data center perspective. What are global CEOs/CIOs worried about? Globalization, scale, complexity, security, and energy. In particuar, Stallings explained how energy has been the surprise concern that is going to change how data centers operate in the future.
In this transformation of the data center, one area of cost savings includes dealing with heat. As a global concern, power and cooling are going to drive data center changes, with Linux at the center because of flexibility, speed, and a history of caring about these matters.
Stallings describes an average achievable energy savings of 40%, with an average payback of less than two years. For every dollar of energy savings, there is an average additional six to eight dollars in operational savings.