Red Hat Hires Sun VP To Focus On Desktop Strategy
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Combined with recent Netscape app purchases, the move gets Linux provider closer to integrating desktops with network services. By Larry Greenemeier.
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Plans call for a Linux-based platform that will be usable in multiple environments, including on PCs, servers and PDAs.
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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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Red Hat, the top seller of Linux, has hired a former Sun Microsystems executive to head its push to get the open-source operating system on desktop computers.
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Ziff Davis - In an eWEEK interview, the Sun exec says he sees Solaris, Linux, Java and even Windows coexisting.
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Despite the competitive pressures, Red Hat is staying focused on the fundamentals - improving compatibility between Linux and Windows, for instance -- and on some advanced technology the company is starting to introduce to enterprise customers, according to Red Hat's chief technology officer.
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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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Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.It&#39;s a strategy Sun started several years ago with a free version of its application server and that it has accelerated with such products&#160;as StarOffice, OpenSolaris, its Open xVM virtualization software, and, most recently,&#160;its acquisition of the open-source database vendor MySQL.The free software allows Sun to build communities of developers who will do pilot projects with its software and may eventually buy licenses for commercial deployment, or buy professional services to support critical applications, CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said at the company&#39;s press day Wednesday. He called Sun&#39;s software a &quot;media asset&quot; for building communities.&quot;These are no longer simply software products, these are media properties -- networks around which communities are being built, [and] this is a means for Sun to talk to a very large developer community,&quot; he said.He put up a slide that showed a map of the world covered in pink dots. Each dot represented a download of Solaris, he said, and hence an opportunity for Sun to start a dialogue with IT people that could lead to a sale of its services and hardware.&quot;Not all customers will pay for these products before they use them -- very few will, actually,&quot; he admitted. But they all buy servers and storage on which to run the software, and the download gives Sun a foot in the door to try to capture that sale.&quot;The reason MySQL was interesting to us is it puts 50,000 new dots on that map every day, and from the community, market opportunities will emerge,&quot; Schwartz said.Sun&#39;s growth is important to customers. Its revenue funds its research and development efforts, and customers want to know there is a big community of specialists in Sun products to support their businesses.Analysts are divided about the strategy. At Sun&#39;s financial analyst conference last week, Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said he found it hard to see a link between software downloads and Sun&#39;s revenue growth.&quot;If you were to plot a chart showing revenue growth over the last 12 quarters and Solaris downloads, there would really be no correlation at all,&quot; Sacconaghi said.&quot;Oh, I think there would be an exceptional correlation,&quot; Schwartz replied. &quot;If you had shut those downloads off three years ago, our revenue would have been declining double-digit.&quot;He reiterated the point Wednesday. Sun&#39;s strongest growth period came in the late 1990s and was preceded by wide use of its software in universities, he said. Today, the growth of Sun&#39;s Niagara servers has been driven by making Solaris open source, Schwartz said.Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said there probably is a connection between Sun&#39;s free and open-source software strategy and its revenue growth, but even if there is not, the strategy is helping the company, he said.&quot;Even if you can&#39;t say that each pink dot equals $372, I think the things Sun has been doing with open source and OpenSolaris and Java and so forth have translated into improved relevancy and an improved perception of Sun, and at some level, logic suggests that this played a role in their improved financial picture.&quot;
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Red Hat to incorporate Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System into products to help customers integrate desktops with a networkwide set of computing services.
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Karen Tegan-Padir, who was a Sun vice president that oversaw software engineering on the company&#39;s Java 2 Enteprise Edition-based (J2EE) application server and other Java products, has left Sun to become Red Hat&#39;s vice president of desktop infrastructure
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Red Hat Wednesday made its Enterprise Linux OS available on demand by releasing it for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that hosts business applications.
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With Sun Microsystems set to detail its plans for Solaris 10 on Monday, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz spoke with Computerworld about what the company has up its open-source sleeve.
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newsmaker Red Hat executive sees opportunities despite recent challenges to its position from Microsoft and Oracle.
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Sun who resells Red Hat&#39;s software, is competing for the same customers as Red Hat with their upcoming release of Solaris 10 in January.
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A RED HAT vice president has slammed Sun for refusing to open source its Java code and hanging on like grim death to its patents. The bone of contention is the April agreement between Sun and Microsoft.
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Red Hat's  new chief executive  said on Friday that the company will continue to pursue a  business model under which it makes its software available at  no cost and makes money selling services to businesses.
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As Red Hat Inc. prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations.