Open source and IT modernization—A perfect storm of opportunity
Red Hat and other open source companies work closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) using the secure content automation (SCAP) p...
One of the reasons why the Office of American Innovation in the White House demonstrated a lot of support for open source technology is in regard to the cloud and the emphasis of the migration of legacy applications to the cloud, and the requirements on agencies to use more digital related technology to improve service to the citizens.
Rob Efrus
President, Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software in Government
Cybersecurity and IT Modernization
If you look at some recent incidents like Heartbleed or Spectre, these things were actually solved in the open source community on day one. In a larger community, we have a lot of different folks looking at code from a lot of different angles. There’s a real-time community of a very broad and diverse audience of global coders actually looking at this and trying to come up with solutions.
Paul Smith
Senior Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector, Red Hat
August was the two year anniversary of the Office of Management and Budget’s open source policy, promoting the reuse of custom software code, and establishing a website to host that code.
So far 26 agencies have posted code for reuse.
The move to open source goes beyond just a website and a listing of code. The Defense Department launched earlier this year code.mil and has been moving much of its custom-developed software source code to a central repository and begin managing and licensing it via open source methods.
The 2016 memo was actually the second time OMB tried to promote open source. Back in 2004, then OMB administrator for e-government and IT Karen Evans issued a memo addressing how agencies bought software. While that memo wasn’t specifically about open source, OMB did remind agencies about how the licensing of open source software works.
The Defense Department isn’t much better, issuing open source policies in 2003 and 2009.
Despite these efforts and what seems like 15 years of focusing on open source, the uptick remains slow.
But Paul Smith, the general manager and senior vice president North America Public Sector for Red Hat, said with the push for IT modernization across government, open source is becoming that much more attractive to agencies.
“We harness all that innovation, freeze dry it at a point and time, and offer it as a product and offer version control. That way we can make sure it works with all of your hardware and software systems,” Smith said on the Innovation in Government program. “At a high level, if you take a look at what’s going on with dev/ops as a methodology or a process, it’s the ability to go in in small chunks and fail fast or learn fast and iterate. Open source at its very roots is that. We have been doing that for 25 years.”
Rob Efrus, the president of the Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software for Government, which works with companies on educating federal executives on the differences between free and enterprise open source, said federal adoption of open source has been climbing steadily over the last decade.
“One of the reasons why the Office of American Innovation in the White House demonstrated a lot of support for open source technology is in regard to the cloud and the emphasis of the migration of legacy applications to the cloud, and the requirements on agencies to use more digital related technology to improve service to the citizens,” Efrus said. “This puts pressure on agencies to come up in a quick turnaround way with applications, many relying on or built on open source technology, that can address not only legacy migration, but the shift to digital.”
As IT modernization, the move to agile or dev/ops and the focus on digital services continues to pick up steam, Smith said agencies now have a platform based on open source where they can develop applications and modernize existing systems more quickly.
“If you look at Google compute, Azure and Amazon Web services, they are delivering infrastructure-as-a-service. You can spin up a machine and do development. Now customers are bringing that on-premise with the same type of constructs and the same type of architecture,” Smith said. “The real challenge now is how do I do both. There are a lot of applications and a lot of workloads that have to live in both places.”
He said enterprise open source can help agencies with the challenges of portability, agility and protections from getting locked-in to a cloud service.
Among the biggest concerns with open source over the last decade has been around security. Smith said it’s a constant discussion with customers.
But the old industry adage “with many eyeballs looking at code, there are shallow bugs” is truer than ever.
Red Hat and other open source companies work closely with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) using the secure content automation (SCAP) protocol to automate security controls, the General Services Administration’s 18F organization on configuration lockdown.
“If you look at some recent incidents like Heartbleed or Spectre, these things were actually solved in the open source community on day one,” Smith said. “In a larger community, we have a lot of different folks looking at code from a lot of different angles. There’s a real-time community of a very broad and diverse audience of global coders actually looking at this and trying to come up with solutions.”
About Red Hat:
Government agencies demand performance, transparency, and value—exactly what Red Hat offers. As the standard for Linux in governments worldwide, our cloud, virtualization, storage and platform solutions bring freedom and collaboration to the public sector. Bring the power of open source to your agency.
About CEOSSG:
The Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software for Government (CEOSSG) is a membership-based, non-profit organization comprised of top-tier open source vendors and affiliated Open Source groups committed to communicating the benefits associated with federal agency utilization of enterprise-class open source software solutions.
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Senior Vice President and General Manager of Public Sector, Red Hat
Paul Smith is senior vice president and general manager of Public Sector at Red Hat. Smith joined Red Hat in November 2004 and leads the Red Hat government business unit with responsibility for sales, marketing, consulting, channels, and strategic planning. The business unit is responsible for the U.S. federal government worldwide and the U.S. state, local, and education marketplace nationally.
Smith brings to Red Hat more than 30 years of experience marketing key technologies to the government marketplace holding various management positions in the sales of software solutions to government agencies and to systems integrators.
Before joining Red Hat, Smith was vice president of Government Operations at VERITAS where he, within his 5-year tenure, helped lead his business unit to be the fastest-growing vertical within the company. Smith also worked at Netscape Communication, where he led sales for its state and local organization nationwide. Prior to that, he led sales organizations at Oracle in the areas of Public Sector, Aerospace, and Defense, and the Department of Defense. Smith also worked for Unisys Corporation, where he held management positions responsible for federal civilian agencies.
Rob Efrus
President, Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software in Government
Robert G. Efrus, is the Founder and CEO, Efrus Federal Advisors LLC. He focuses exclusively on helping federal IT vendors expand their presence in the federal marketplace. Over the course of his 30 year industry career, including his role as Presidential Management Fellow at NASA Headquarters and congressional staff member for a United States Senator, Mr. Efrus has provided outsourced business development and lobbying services to the public sector sales organizations of federal market leaders, including: NetApp, HPE/MicroFocus Government Solutions, Iron Mountain, VMware, Viptela/Cisco, Lookout, Carahsoft, Symantec, Brocade, Oracle, BEA Systems, Yahoo!, Kronos, and Digital Realty. Mr. Efrus specializes in helping publicly-traded and privately funded technology companies align their offerings and sales operations to the federal marketplace.
Efrus Federal Advisors (EFA) provides government relations and business development consulting services to the public sector sales organizations of small, medium and large federal IT vendors. Areas of emphasis include cyber/software security, cloud, data center consolidation, data storage and networking, open source software and federal records management issues.
Mr. Efrus also serves as President of the Coalition for Enterprise Open Source Software in Government. CEOSSG is a membership-based, non-profit organization comprised of top-tier open source vendors committed to communicating the benefits associated with federal agency utilization of enterprise-class open source software solutions. A key objective of CEOSSG is to highlight to federal IT policy and acquisition stakeholders in Congress and the Executive Branch that the labor costs of modifying “free” community-based OS solutions so that they scale and are compliant with federal information security standards are usually never considered before a purchasing decision is made. This approach, which is out of compliance with applicable rules in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), deprive Enterprise Open Source Software (EOSS) vendors, who have invested their own capital to ensure their OS solutions are saleable and compliant with all federal regulations, a fair opportunity to compete. This concern is at the heart of why CEOSSG was established.
Jason Miller
Executive Editor, FederalNewsRadio.com
Jason Miller is an executive editor and reporter with Federal News Radio. As executive editor, Jason helps direct the news coverage of the station and works with reporters to ensure a broad range of coverage of federal technology, procurement, finance and human resource news.As a reporter, Jason focuses mainly on technology and procurement issues, including cybersecurity, e-government and acquisition policies and programs.