Q&amp;A: Red Hat&#39;s CEO on his company&#39;s latest acquisition
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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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update A top Red Hat executive has attacked the open-source credentials of its sometime business partner Sun Microsystems. In a Web log posting Thursday, Michael Tiemann, Red Hat&#39;s vice president of open-source
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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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Two months after announcing the resignation of its chief financial officer and six weeks after it changed the way it books support subscription revenue, Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. has named a new CFO.
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Red Hat on Thursday named Charles Peters Jr. as executive vice president and chief financial officer. Peters replaces Kevin Thompson, who unexpectedly announced his resignation in June, a few days before the
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Company co-founder explains why the Linux company chose the name Red Hat.
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InfoWorld - The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March should strengthen Red Hat&#39;s lead in the open-source software market and fend off challenges from Oracle, Microsoft, and Novell, an industry analyst said.
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Two years ago today, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik confirmed the purhase of two prized enterprise products from AOL - Netscape Directory Server and Netscape Certificate Management System. He also noted than Red Hat intended to open source the products within 12 months.  Red Hat paid $25 million for the assets. You could say that was pretty good considering that in 1998, AOL paid more than $4 billion for Netscape. Matthew's purchase represented the last divestiture of Netscape's assets by AOL. If you wander on over to the Fedora Directory Server (FDS) site you can take a look at an enhanced version of the Netscape Directory Server. This isn't your older brother's directory server. Aside from open sourcing the Netscape server, you'll find an abundance of documentation to help you learn and operate a stellar product. In the case you have little familiarity with FDS, it has features you will not find in other open source LDAP servers.  These include: Multi-master replication  Hot-backups and restores  Integration utility for Microsoft Active Directory users and groups  A graphical management console and web available administration
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What's behind the fallout between Intel and the One Laptop Per Child program; News.com's Stephen Shankland talks with Red Hat's new CEO; and album sales drop in 2007.
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Red Hat Inc. RHAT.O, a Linux  software distributor that in July said it would restate three  years' of financial results, on Thursday named Charles Peters  as chief financial officer.
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The Motley Fool - Open-source software leader Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - News) reports earnings after the bell today, and analysts are expecting a doozy. With on-again-off-again reports that Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News) may enter the Linux market, Red Hat's stock has certainly been volatile, but management has been quite sanguine about further competition from the database giant. Is this one huge strategic misstep or savvy thinking? Read on for my thoughts.
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Red Hat Inc. has announced the general release of the third update to its Enterprise Linux operating system, as well as a new partnership with recent Linux convert Unisys Corp.
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Linux Journal recently caught up with Mandriva CEO, Fran??ois Bancilhon, to find out more about a recently announced partnership between Mandriva of France and Turbolinux of Japan. read more
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The Motley Fool - On Wednesday, Sept. 27, longtime Linux leader Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - News) released Q2 2007 earnings for the period ending Aug. 31, 2006.
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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.
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CEO John Allison discusses the firm's challenges and opportunities.
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InfoWorld - Asian governments are pivotal to Red Hat's goal of earning 60 percent of its revenue from outside the U.S. by the end of 2009, said Matthew Szulik, the company's chairman, chief executive officer, and president, in a conference call on Thursday.