Red Hat to Focus on Core Products and Service
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New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says the company will focus on its Linux OS and middleware while improving customer service.
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If Novell wants to be relevant they need to put a stake in the ground where Red Hat isn't already dominating. .NET is the answer.
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New Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst pledged that his company will continue to follow the open-source business model it has used in the past, calling Red Hat a "mission-based company."
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Migrating to the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 distribution can cause things to break if youre not aware of the changes. Here are the four major new categories of upgrades you'll need to plan for.
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Red Hat has launched an online version of Command Center, its integrated server and application monitoring service. It also brings new features and a free evaluation version.
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With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 lined up for release next year, the open source solutions vendor has released a power pack to ensure that customers using the existing version 3.0 have access to the latest enhancements in Linux.
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Having established itself as the leading enterprise Linux vendor,&#160;Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle. It&#39;s a tall order, and among other things it will take a business plan that lets the company move smoothly through this make-or-break stage.Coming up with that internal plan lies on the shoulders of 30-year IT veteran Nick Van Wyk. Van Wyk joined Red Hat last year from EMC, taking a newly created role as vice president of operations to optimize Red Hat&#39;s subscription model and create better business processes to support the company&#39;s channel.Two weeks ago, Red Hat also appointed him to a new role as senior director, transformation, in charge of examining the company&#39;s internal processes and operations to &quot;reposition all of our systems to support the next stage of our evolution,&quot; he said.That stage includes capitalizing on its April 2006 purchase of JBoss and the open-source middleware package that comes along with it, as well as growing from a company with annual revenue of about $500 million to a billion-dollar company. Red Hat, whose affections toward other vendors can be fickle, also is challenged to build out a stronger ecosystem of partners to support not only Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS but also JBoss and any new technologies it brings to the table.In the current technology business climate, Red Hat is a bit of an anomaly. The company has managed to exist for nearly 10 years with one core competency: a Linux server distribution it supports and provides maintenance for. The company has branched out into other areas of software, such as desktop Linux and virtualization, but for the most part, the server OS has been its bread and butter.Recognizing it can&#39;t subsist long on this diet in an environment of consolidation and diversification, Red Hat made a calculated risk and purchased JBoss. It&#39;s now trying to position itself to make the most out of that and possible other new product developments or purchases, Van Wyk said.&quot;As we move forward, we will more be described as an open source services and solutions company,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s an enhanced position for Red Hat.&quot;In its present situation, Red Hat has &quot;a base, a critical mass of applications from which to grow,&quot; said George Weiss, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. But investors are more interested in what comes next than in how well Red Hat is currently executing, he said.&quot;It&#39;s not a look at the present basis, it&#39;s what you can do to instill market confidence that you have a sufficiently scalable business model, and the operating system alone is not going to be it,&quot; Weiss said.Van Wyk knows full well the pressure on the company, and said that during Red Hat&#39;s two-to-three-year transformation, the company will be making changes to ensure it can meet both the internal and the external needs of scaling an IT company.The company is currently examining how it handles a host of functions, among them lead management, partner relationship management, subscriptions, financial systems and technical support. The next step in the transition will be to make changes where necessary to ensure the business is operating efficiently and providing the highest levels of customer service, he said.&quot;This whole idea of ease -- the ease of doing business with Red Hat, the ease of support, the automation of those technologies, the time to acquire OS technologies, zero time to subscribe -- those are all built into [our goals],&quot; Van Wyk said. &quot;These are things that have been said to us that customers want to have.&quot;Van Wyk declined to go into detail about exactly how Red Hat will execute on this strategy, saying the company won&#39;t really have a clear idea of the changes it will make until the initial assessment is complete.One thing Red Hat should consider is more acquisitions, said Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. But Red Hat should move fast to acquire companies that will help them get into new markets -- such as database and data management -- because larger IT vendors are eyeing similar purchases.&quot;They have companies like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP competing for the same targets,&quot; he said. &quot;Red Hat doesn&#39;t have the capital to compete with those suitors. They need to move very quickly before we get into an era where the largest IT vendors are competing for these targets.&quot;
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HP will focus its efforts on security services, security management integration, data security and the intersection of security and corporate governance.
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Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle.
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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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Red Hat Inc. is opening this week its first office in China, as part of its effort to tap demand for low-cost software in developing markets.
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newsmaker Red Hat executive sees opportunities despite recent challenges to its position from Microsoft and Oracle.
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Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) is likely to release a major upgrade to its enterprise operating system in the next two weeks, according to news reports. The software is expected to fully support the Linux 2.6 kernel for the first time.
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Michael Tiemann, a Red Hat executive with years of open-source experience, says soon-to-be-CEO Jim Whitehurst understands the open-source movement.
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Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat&#39;s goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S. by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company&#39;s chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.Governments in the region are beginning to see open source as a boost for their economies and a way to increase technological innovation in the region, Szulik said. The governments of South Korea, Japan, Australia, and China have been &quot;positive spokespeople&quot; for the growing adoption of Linux and open source software in the region, he added.Most of the business for Red Hat in the region, as in the rest of the world, is in the transition from Unix and legacy systems to the Linux operating system. Customers are typically in the financial services, telecommunications, technology and the government sector, Szulik said.At the end of August, Red Hat&#39;s revenue for the first six months of its fiscal year was $246 million, up 34 percent from the previous year. About 85 percent of its revenue came from software subscriptions with the balance coming from services like consulting and training. The company does not break out revenue by regions.Red Hat also had $33 million in operating income for the six months period, up 48 percent from the same period in the previous year. The company has over $1.3 billion in cash on its balance sheet, said Charlie Peters, Red Hat&#39;s chief financial officer.Apart from continuing opportunities in the market for replacement of the Unix operating system with Linux, Red Hat is also seeing revenue coming in from middleware, Peters said. The company&#160;acquired JBoss, a vendor of open-source middleware, in June 2006.Red Hat plans to roll out new technologies in the coming months that will help customers build global virtualized computing infrastructure, Szulik said. The company introduced server, storage, and desktop virtualization as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 earlier this year.An increase in availability of third-party applications around Linux helped boost demand, as Linux has been expanding its share of servers&#160;based on Intel&#39;s x86 architecture and&#160;IBM&#39;s mainframe&#160;and server environments, Szulik said. In addition, there has been an increase of technically trained staff with Linux and open-source skills, he added.
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(InfoWorld) - Leaders of Microsoft's strategy to make its products more interoperable with competitive technologies said the company still hopes to strike a Linux pact with Red Hat similar to the partnerships it's forged with Linux vendors Novell, Xandros, and Linspire. "We'd love to do the same deal with Red Hat," said Tom Robertson, general manager of corporate interoperability and standards at Microsoft in an interview Friday. "We're always open to talking with them." That sentiment so far has not been the same on Red Hat's end, as the company has said it's not interested in a deal. Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday that is still the case. "We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency," she said in an e-mail. Still, some wonder -- as Microsoft lines up the other Linux ducks in a neat little row -- if Red Hat might be next, and rumors suggest a pact might be imminent. Microsoft's latest Linux deal came Thursday in an intellectual property-sharing and interoperabilityÂ agreement with LinspireÂ that would shield the company's customers from Microsoft patent-infringement claims. The deal follows oneÂ struck by Microsoft and Linux distributor XandrosÂ last week, as well asÂ a high-profile and financially significantÂ deal with NovellÂ late last year. Microsoft has said it is seeking these partnerships for a couple of reasons. The one Robertson is most interested in is interoperability, as he -- along with Jean Paoli, general manager, interoperability and XML architecture -- is in charge of Microsoft's 18-month company-wide strategy in this area. Robertson said Microsoft customers have demanded the company address interoperability issues with other companies' software, including open source, and that IP (intellectual property) in those products is a concern for them. "If you look across the industry, you see companies working together to address IP on behalf of their customer base," he said. Microsoft has publicly said that Linux and other open source softwareÂ violates 235 of the company's patents. But rather than seek litigation as a way to settle these IP claims, Microsoft is striking these individual deals, Robertson said. However, much has been made of the fact that the company has not publicly disclosed any of the patents it claims open source software is violating. Robertson would not address why Microsoft will not show its patents and stopped short of claiming the deals with Novell, Linspire, and Xandros prove those companies are indeed violating Microsoft IP. None of the Linux companies will say so, either, and Novell in fact has vehemently denied infringement. This discrepancy is one reason some feel Red Hat will never sign up for an indemnification deal with Microsoft. The size and business viability of the companies that have signed on is another. Novell was flagging when its deal was struck -- and the company has continued to wane even since -- and some familiar with how it happened said it was a bailout to save the vendor from being split up and sold piecemeal. Indeed, Novell's U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing about the deal revealed that Novell got $348 million up front from Microsoft for patent cooperation and Linux coupons, while having to shell out only $40 million to Microsoft in return. Though Microsoft will not comment on the financial terms of deals with Xandros and Linspire, those familiar with the agreements said those companies also received financial compensation from Microsoft. This begs the question that if interoperability and protecting customers are Microsoft's ultimate goals for the deals, as Robertson said, why is the company so interested in Linux companies that ultimately don't affect that many customers? Many -- particularly those in the Linux camp -- suspect Microsoft is trying to make it appear that open source distributors are violating Microsoft IP to vilify them in an effort to dissuade customers from using Linux and other open source technologies. Bruce Perens, a longtime Linux and open source advocate, said Microsoft is giving Linux companies that are on the edge of going out of business money to create the illusion that Linux vendors are stealing its IP. Perens is a vice president at SourceLabs, a company that provides testing, management, and certification of open source software to users. "Here is Microsoft out collecting the losers in the Linux business and paying them money so they can ... paint open source as music pirates out there using Microsoft technology without a license," he said. "I think they're out to scare people." Even if this is the case, it take two to tango, and it's important to note that companies such as Novell, Linspire, and Xandros benefit in various ways from their deals with Microsoft. Aside from any financial compensation, the companies also gain access to Microsoft technology that would make their own Linux products more viable in the marketplace, analysts said. "These companies want the deals with Microsoft because it will make the products more attractive and more compatible with the Windows world," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner. "It's pretty clear that there is definitely value for these companies."
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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.