Red Hat to focus on core products and service, says new CEO
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Red Hat&#39;s new CEO plans to keep the company focused on its core Linux OS and middleware business while also improving the service it offers to customers, he said Thursday.&quot;It&#39;s a very exciting time for Red Hat, we have a very bright future in front of us. Our business model is strong and our growth remains very, very robust,&quot; said Jim Whitehurst, who was speaking in Tokyo during his third week in the job.Whitehurst came to Red Hat from Delta Air Lines&#160;where he served as chief operating officer for two years. During that time he gained experience of being a customer of major IT vendors and says he knows well what is expected of companies like Red Hat.&quot;From a user perspective an absolute focus on service is critical. Based on talking to customers so far, one observation I have is that we need to re-double our effort working with our various partners in service,&quot; he said.Because much of Red Hat&#39;s business is done through resellers and the channel, there can sometimes be disconnects in customer service. For example, Red Hat might end up telling a customer to contact the partner while the partner refers the customer back to Red Hat, he said.But is Whitehurst the right man to be talking about customer service? After all, he came to Red Hat from an industry that is the subject of frequent complaints from its customers.&quot;I think airlines only beat out cable TV operators in customer satisfaction surveys so I&#39;m certainly not going to defend the airline industry&#39;s record on customer service,&quot; he said. Experience at Delta taught him the need to pick a small number of things and do them well to improve overall satisfaction, he said.&quot;The Delta situation was the fastest major bankruptcy ever and during that situation our customer service numbers actually went up quite significantly. We did it by focusing on a couple of things. In the airline industry it&#39;s clean airplanes and on-time, those were the two things we focused on. I know those sound like two little things but they significantly impact the customer experience,&quot; said Whitehurst.For Red Hat he said he is still working on which areas will be the priorities that he focuses upon.&quot;I understand the importance from the customer&#39;s perspective of excellent customer service in IT,&quot; he said. &quot;As an industry, information technology is not known for excellence in serving our customers well and I have been adamant from day one that everything Red Hat does will be viewed through the eyes of the customer.&quot;
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Red HatÂ plans to launch a major upgrade to its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system that will mark the first time the software has fully supported the Linux 2.6 kernel. The launch currently is scheduled to occur at an event that will coincide with the Linuxworld Conference & Expo in Boston next month, a spokeswoman for the company has confirmed.
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat has changed the pricing model for its SaaS-based system monitoring and added support for more software packages, the company said on Wednesday. The Red Hat Command Center service provides remote system monitoring for systems running operating systems including Solaris, Windows and, of course, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. VMware also is monitored. With the upgrade, Red Hat has changed to a price of $192 per server, annually, said Donald Fischer, Red Hat vice president of online services. Previously, pricing involved a complicated model based on usage after the fact and factoring in the number of services. "Now, it's just a basic annual subscription per server. We got a lot of feedback that that's just a simpler way to consume this kind of service," Fischer said. Also added to the service is basic system monitoring of all servers in a network when service is purchased for just a single server. Command Center will ping other servers just to make sure they are functioning. But additional capabilities, such as monitoring of FTP services and application servers, are restricted to the server monitored for the $192 price tag. Red Hat also has updated which software it can monitor, adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the JBoss 4 application server, the Oracle10g database and VMware ESX version 3. At IT outsourcer ITresources, the company is using Command Center as a network operations tool competitive to how it would use CA Unicenter, HP OpenView or Tivoli, said Chad Decatur, senior manager of IT infrastructure for ITresources. Command Center has been very affordable and reports for SLAs are easy to run, he said. "It doesn't seem to have a lot of latency," Decatur said. Also, it is easy to learn. "Somebody doesn't have to devote their career to learning the product," said Decatur.Â  Technology leveraged in Command Center was acquired from NOCpulse in 2002, Fischer said.
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Linux software maker Red Hat on Tuesday released an update to its enterprise product with security upgrades, support for IBM Power5 servers, new driver support and bug fixes.
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After his company announced plans to acquire security and authentication tools from Netscape Security Solutions, Red Hat Inc. CEO and chairman Matthew Szulik spoke to Computerworld about the company's plans.
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Linux publisher Red Hat Inc. said Tuesday that information-technology consulting firm Unisys Corp. will begin offering a business version of the company&#39;s open-source operating system on its servers.
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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OCTOBER 01, 2004  - After his company announced that it&#39;s acquiring security and authentication tools from Netscape Security Solutions to bolster its software arsenal (see story), Red Hat Inc.
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There&#39;s a new CFO in town at Red Hat Inc., and while the company continues to be perceived as one of the leading Linux providers, he&#39;s got his work cut out for him when it comes to restoring investor confidence.
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First hardware maker to align with community-based Linux offering.
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InfoWorld - Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.
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Red Hat Inc. , a Linux software distributor that in July said it would restate three years&#39; of financial results, on Thursday named Charles Peters as chief financial officer.
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Open-source champion Red Hat has taken its new CFO from the traditional business world. Charles Peters, who becomes executive vice president and CFO of the Linux-based firm, has a solid background as a qualified
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CRN India: Red Hat aims to more deeply penetrate the enterprise by launching its first Linux distribution based on the Linux 2.6 kernel.
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Red Hat chairman and chief executive Matthew Szulik said in a statement: &quot;Directory Server and Certificate Management System have already been widely deployed in the enterprise and are mature
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Jim Whitehurst, 40, thinks his experience as Delta's COO will help him turn Red Hat into a big company. Also, he talks the open-source talk.
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Longtime Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik is being replaced, the company announced on the same day it posted a quarterly revenue gain of 28 percent.James Whitehurst, formerly the COO for Delta Airlines, will take on Szulik&#39;s leadership positions and a seat on the board starting in the new year. Szulik, currently president and CEO, will remain as chairman of the board.Szulik had been Red Hat&#39;s CEO for the past eight years and is one of the most prominent business executives in the open-source world.Whitehurst joins Red Hat as the company works through a transition aimed at helping it compete better with giants like Oracle and Microsoft. The company is best known for its Linux server distribution, but that market is getting increasingly crowded. As a result, Red Hat is trying to reach out into other areas or beef up existing offerings, like its services.Despite the competitive landscape, Red Hat managed to produce solid results for its third quarter ending Nov. 30. It posted revenue of $135.4 million, an increase of 28 percent over the same period last year.Net income reached $20.3 million or $0.10 per diluted share, compared with $14.6 million or $0.07 per diluted share in the corresponding quarter of 2006.The company highlighted its JBoss Advanced Partner Program, launched during the quarter, aimed at offering support services to value-added resources in North America.&#160;Red Hat bought JBoss last year&#160;as part of its efforts to expand its offerings.