Red Hat tight lipped on Microsoft talks
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But middleware will make it chatty Analysis The debate over who in the Linux camp will next get into bed with Microsoft is back on, after Red Hat's chief executive admitted to holding patent talks.â¦
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Ziff Davis - In an interview with eWEEK.com and in his Weblog, Red Hat's Michael Tiemann lashes out at Sun as the two companies start to compete head-on.
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In a story for the Associated Press this afternoon, one of the directors of Microsoft's Windows Client Product Planning team is quoted as saying that a Black Hat security conference demonstration last August scared Microsoft to the point where the company seriously considered removing virtualization capability from Vista entirely.
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Microsoft has some serious questions to answer....
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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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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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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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Press sources were not able to keep a tight lid on impending news from Microsoft tomorrow regarding a new acquisition in the virtualization space, and a change to its licensing policy regarding virtual desktops.
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Microsoft has filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) - and it looks like the Redmond giant could be in for a lean year ahead, even going as far as to hint that Linux and other open-source rivals might be to blame.
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Microsoft said the company hopes to strike a Linux pact with Red Hat similar to the partnerships it has forged with Linux vendors.
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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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InfoWorld - As Red Hat 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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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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Conference will allow developers to examine, discuss the successor to Windows XP.
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Microsoft Corp. said in court Thursday that it had been prepared during settlement talks to share more software code with its rivals than the European Union ultimately demanded.
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Many of Microsoft's partners kicked off last week's Worldwide Partner Conference last week uneasy about the Redmond giant's big push into the software-plus-services arena, but in the wake of the gathering the majority of attendees appear to be upbeat about the possibilities.
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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.