So we’ve built some first-generation integration between Chef and BladeLogic 8.5, which we’re demoing in our booth for the first time here at ChefConf. You can use BladeLogic to call Chef cookbooks and recipes on a push/scheduled basis, and you can reference BladeLogic compliance policies from inside your Chef cookbooks. It’s all very early and not production-ready, but we want to put this integration front and center with the people here at ChefConf and start a conversation about how they want to blend these two approaches to a stable, managed IT infrastructure.

Brandon Butler sums up the “old” (Linux) vs “new” (middleware and cloud) revenue stream for Red Hat The company gets about 80% of its $1.3 billion in revenues from a category that’s headlined by RHEL, and those subscriptions aren’t likely going away any time soon, says Joel Fishbein, who tracks Red Hat’s stock closely as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. … The enterprise transition from Unix to Linux is fairly mature, with revenue from the RHEL-focused main part of the business growing 13% last year, Fishbein says.

After seeing one of the other SDN forecast studies referenced here, one of my 451 collegues sent some finding from our recent (August 2013) survey on software defined networking usage: TheInfoPro survey has adoption at a much lower level. Wave 10, based on 154 interviews and published August 2013, has it at 16% in use or in plan and 77% not in plan (7% didn’t know the answer).