Red Hat and Microsoft fuel hybrid cloud development with Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which brings a jointly-managed enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution to Microsoft’s a leading public cloud, Microsoft Azure. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a powerful on-ramp to hybrid cloud computing, enabling IT organizations to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in their datacenters and more seamlessly extend these workloads to use the power and scale of Azure services. The availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift marks the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud.

Both Red Hat and Microsoft recognize the importance of hybrid cloud computing to modern IT, as organizations look to expand resources with public cloud infrastructure while maintaining existing on-premises investments. Kubernetes provides a common bridge between the datacenter and public cloud environments, making it a key technology in enabling true hybrid cloud computing.

Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines the innovation of enterprise Kubernetes with the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, running on the scale and power of Azure. Together, these technologies provide a powerful solution for more easily managing and orchestrating cloud-native workloads across a hybrid cloud environment. With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, customers can also bring containerized applications into workflows where they exist, while mitigating many of the inherent complexities of container management.

A fully-managed, jointly-operated service, Azure Red Hat OpenShift is backed by both the open source expertise of Red Hat and the public cloud might of Microsoft. Customers receive an integrated experience, including unified sign-up, on-boarding, service management and technical support. The service is added into customers’ existing Azure bill, further streamlining the user experience.

Additionally, Azure Red Hat OpenShift offers enterprise developers and operations teams:

• Fully managed clusters with master, infrastructure and application nodes managed by Microsoft and Red Hat; plus, no VMs to operate and no patching required.
• Regulatory compliance will be provided through compliance certifications similar to other Azure services.
• Enhanced flexibility to more freely move applications from on-premise environments to the Azure public cloud via the consistent foundation of OpenShift.
• Greater speed to connect to Azure services from on-premises OpenShift deployments.
• Extended productivity with easier access to Azure public cloud services such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning and Azure SQL DB for building the next-generation of cloud-native enterprise applications.

Azure Red Hat OpenShift represents Red Hat and Microsoft’s continued mutual commitment to provide a powerful, supported and more secure choice for developing and deploying hybrid cloud workloads. Jointly supported by both companies, IT organizations can have greater confidence in adopting hybrid cloud innovation that meets the requirements of mission-critical workloads in production.

Microsoft and Red Hat are also collaborating to bring customers containerized solutions with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 on Azure, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 and Ansible Certified modules. In addition, the two companies are working to deliver SQL Server 2019 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support and performance enhancements.

Microsoft stock drops as tech giant falls just short on revenue expectations, reporting $32.5B

Microsoft’s hardware team had a huge holiday season and its cloud division continues to grow rapidly, but the company’s stock is dropping after reporting a mixed bag of financial results for the quarter.

• Revenue: Microsoft reported $32.47 billion in revenue for its second fiscal quarter, a figure that is up 12 percent over the prior year and is just shy of the $32.5 billion analysts expected.
• Profits: Net income of $8.6 billion — or $1.10 per share, which is up 9 percent over a year ago — came slightly above analyst expectations of profits of $1.09 per share

“Our strong commercial cloud results reflect our deep and growing partnerships with leading companies in every industry including retail, financial services, and healthcare,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement. “We are delivering differentiated value across the cloud and edge as we work to earn customer trust every day.”

Microsoft stock is down about 2.7 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday. The primary factor in the revenue miss was a 5 percent drop in Windows OEM revenue, the money Microsoft brings in from selling Windows to computer makers.

Microsoft splits the company into three main areas in its earnings reports. Here’s how each one did in the quarter ending in December:

• In the company’s Productivity and Business Processes division, which includes Office 365 and LinkedIn, revenue increased 13 percent over last year to $10.1 billion.
• Intelligent Cloud revenue was up 20 percent to $9.4 billion, powered by 76 percent annual revenue growth from Azure.
• Revenue in the company’s More Personal Computing division, which includes its Windows PC business, Surface products and gaming teams jumped 7 percent over last year to $13 billion.

Several parts of the business hit revenue milestones in the quarter.

Surface: Revenue from Microsoft’s Surface division, responsible for much of its hardware offerings, was flat for the last few holiday seasons. That certainly changed this time around as Microsoft reported a whopping 39 percent growth in Surface revenue over last year to $1.86 billion.

Microsoft unveiled versions of the most popular Surface tablets and computers as well as the surprising new Surface Headphones at an event in October. Reveal events in the fall, ahead of the holiday shopping season have become a trend among most big companies, and it appears to have paid off for Microsoft this time around.

Gaming: The division that includes everything from Xbox hardware to Xbox Live subscriptions to revenue from games made by Microsoft as well as other studios, hit $4 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, following annual growth of 8 percent.

The number of Xbox Live users jumped from 57 million a year ago to 64 million in the most recent quarter, one of the biggest increases in years. Xbox hardware revenue declined 19 percent from last year, when the Xbox One X was released, while Xbox software and services revenue increased 31 percent.

LinkedIn: Revenue from the business social network grew 29 percent over last year. Microsoft last quarter stopped reporting LinkedIn revenue and profits/losses as it continued to fold the business social network into its organization more than two years after completing the $26 billion acquisition.

A year ago, LinkedIn brought in $1.31 billion in revenue. A 29 percent increase year-over-year increase would bring revenue in the most recent quarter to just shy of $1.7 billion.

Highlights from the quarter

• Microsoft claimed the title of the most-valuable U.S. company in November — beating out Apple — and it has been volleying the honor back and forth with Amazon in recent weeks.
• Microsoft secured a huge win for the Surface division with a deal in December to supply the Law School Admission Council with thousands of Surface Go devices to use for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT).
• In November, Microsoft won a $480 million contract to provide the U.S. Army with 100,000 HoloLens headsets, a major boon for the company’s “mixed reality” division.
• Microsoft’s cloud division continued to woo retailers weary of using Amazon Web Services while also competing with Amazon on the retail front, landing a deal with Gap and furthering its partnership with Walmart. 

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