Red Hat opens office in China
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The Linux firm said it will be collaborating with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and Oracle, as well as with Chinese companies.
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Microsoft and Satyam Computer Services opened two business intelligence software testing and development centers in Asia on Tuesday, hoping to usher in a new era for Chinese financial applications.
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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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(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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Unisys, the maker of high-end servers, has joined the Red Hat Partner Community, strengthening its ties to the Linux vendor. Unisys, formerly a Windows-only shop, began offering its ES7000 servers
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Linux provider Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) announced the appointment of Charles E. Peters Jr. as executive vice president and chief financial officer.
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Release of a new Linux distribution and other software boost Red Hat's first quarter earnings.
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The lab home of Linux founder Linus Torvalds hires an intellectual-property attorney and says hello to Beijing.
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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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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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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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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat has pushed out the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, an upgrade to its operating system thatÂ includes virtualization technologiesÂ intended to help companies get more use from their hardware. The final version of the product is due to ship by year's end, although it was unclear this week if Red Hat will meet that target. RHEL 5 Beta 1, which was released Friday, was originally due to ship in July, with a second beta expected in September. The beta appears to be aimed mostly at existing subscribers to the Red Hat Network. Non-customers can try out the software but they have to contact a local Red Hat office or apply atÂ http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/eval (The page says RHEL 4 but Red Hat says it's for RHEL 5 as well). The beta is for testing purposes and Red Hat emphasized that it's not intended for production use. It's asking for feedback to hone the final version of the product, and wants to hear about how it is implementing the open-source Xen virtualization technology in particular. Xen allows companies to run multiple operating systems on a server at the same time, making better use of computing power that's often otherwise left idle. Virtualization on mainframes has been around for a long time, but it's now being adopted on lower-end servers as well as they become more powerful. Novell has already incorporated Xen into its Linux distribution, Suse Linux 10 Server, released in July. And MicrosoftÂ has said that Windows Longhorn Server will be compatible with Xen-enabled versions of Linux, allowing customers to run Linux and Windows side by side on the same server. Other new features in the RHEL 5 beta include the disk dumping tool Kdump, which can speed reboot times and is handy for developers who have to reboot systems several times a day, and the SystemTap and Frysk analysis and development tools. The beta also includes a technical preview of what Red Hat calls its stateless Linux technology, which reduces dependencies on individual clients to make the OS easier to manage and modify remotely. The server OS is available for most of the popular hardware platforms; availability for the client OS is more limited. Details areÂ available here.
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(InfoWorld) - The next Linux distribution that IBM throws its weight behind is likely to be China's Red Flag Linux, suggesting that for businesses elsewhere in the world the Linux market will remain a two-horse race for the time being. Support from vendors like IBM and Oracle makes a big difference for the adoption of a Linux distribution. It gives big businesses the confidence that the software will be around and supported for several years to come. IBM wants to give its customers as much choice with Linux as it can, but the cost of porting and testing applications for more than the two leading distributions -- from Red Hat and NovellÂ -- makes it impractical to widely support a third option, said Adam Jollans, IBM's worldwide marketing and strategy manager for open source. The next distribution that IBM supports widely is likely to be one for the Chinese market, where the leading contender right now is Red Flag Linux, from Red Flag Software, Jollans said. "We're watching China very closely to see what happens there," he said. IBM has around 300 software products. Supporting both Red Hat and Suse Linux effectively doubles the number for which it has to do testing. Adding support for its three main hardware platforms -- x86, and IBM's Power and zSeries -- means IBM has to test 1,800 software products. Adding broad support for a third Linux OS, such as Debian, would take that number to 2,700. "We're not ready yet to go to another multiple," Jollans said, during a discussion with reporters in Paris on Thursday. The company will support other distributions today, but typically only for large customers or large installations. Jollans also addressed a question about why IBM did not release its own Linux distribution several years ago. "We thought that if IBM was in the market as an 800-pound gorilla, it would have a negative effect on the Linux market. We won't do something that sets us against the community," he said.
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Linux distributor Red Hat Inc. has appointed a new chief financial officer following the resignation of former CFO Kevin Thompson and the recent restatement of its revenue after an accounting policy change.
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(InfoWorld) - IBMÂ on Monday introduced new services, dubbed Open Client, designed to make it easier for customers to run its Lotus collaboration software on a mixture of Windows and Linux desktop operating systems. The Open Client services will include desktop management and application migration support and advice on best practices. Red Hat and its main Linux distribution rival, Novell, will provide operating system services. In coming up with the services, IBM applied lessons it learned during its own deployment of desktop operating systems, notably Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Workstation software, according to Jeff Smith, vice president, open source and Linux middleware for IBM. "It's about applying the right technology to the right user," he said. Roles-based computing is a concept most software vendors are touting, especially IBM's main groupware rival Microsoft. With Open Client and other initiatives, IBM's now seeking to differentiate itsÂ Lotus collaboration softwareÂ from Microsoft's Exchange offering by stressing its multiplatform capabilities. Microsoft doesn't provide support for Linux. IBM has also been slow to come out with versions of its Notes client and Sametime instant-messaging software that can run natively on the open-source operating system. The vendor onlyÂ announced native Linux support for NotesÂ and Sametime in July and August of last year respectively. Previously, users had to rely on Web clients or software emulation. It became easier for IBM to offer native Linux support once it moved to new base versions of its software, including Notes and Sametime. The new versions run on a middleware layer from the open-source Eclipse Foundation, which IBM calls the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, Smith said. Open Client covers Notes, Sametime, WebSphere Portal 6.0 for building portal applications and services accessible by a Web browser and Lotus Expeditor, an Eclipse-based client development platform for composite applications. IBM plans to add widen the scope of its Open Client services later this year to add in support for Apple's Macintosh operating system. The vendor also intends Open Client to include Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, when they ship later this year. In IBM's internal deployment, the company created a single software stack of its collaboration software so that staff could integrate their Lotus applications running on Windows or Linux into IBM's enterprise infrastructure. About 5 percent of IBM's 329,373 work force, some 16,468 staff, are running Lotus software on Linux, up from the 5,000 employees involved last year in beta testing the new versions of the vendor's collaboration software. The staff running Lotus on Linux include software and hardware developers, chip designers, Linux support and marketing staff and research groups. Linux doesn't yet make sense for IBM business consultants who use a mobile device as their main computer. "The capabilities are there to support just about every workload," Smith said. "The difference is what effort is required to pull it all together." Running applications on Linux on mobile devices is still more challenging than on desktops or servers. IBM's due to talk more about Open Client on Wednesday and Thursday at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York, Smith said. Â
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InfoWorld - Red Hat&#160;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 Oracle&#160;and the Microsoft-Novell&#160;partnership.
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(InfoWorld) - A China Telecommunications Group (China Telecom) subsidiary in Jiangsu province and Hewlett-Packard are offering customers a desktop computer with broadband Internet access for 198 renminbi, or $26, per month. The promotion offer underscores how competitive China's PC and Internet markets have become, and the extent to which the market has become saturated after years of breakneck growth. For a monthly payment of 198 renminbi and a 27-month contract, China Telecom customers in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, get an HP Compaq DX2308 desktop PC with a 3.2GHz Intel Celeron D processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and a 17-inch CRT monitor, according to an online advertisement (in Chinese). The bundle includes 150 hours of broadband Internet access per month, most likely a 512Kbps DSL (digital subscriber line) connection, the most common in China. For an additional 700 renminbi, customers can upgrade to a 17-inch LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor. A similar deal is available in other Jiangsu cities, including Nantong (in Chinese). This isn't the first time China Telecom and HP have offered a PC bundled with broadband for 198 renminbi. Similar deals were offered in Jiangsu province earlier this year. Bundles like this are not yet common in China, although several vendors have experimented with them and seen mixed results, said Bryan Ma, director of personal system research at IDC Asia-Pacific. Besides the low-cost desktop, China Telecom and HP are offering a couple of other options to Taizhou customers, including an HP Compaq NX6515 notebook with a dual-core 1.6GHz Turion 64 X2 processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard disk, and a 14-inch screen. The notebook deal involves a one-time payment of 6,998 renminbi, or $923, and includes 1,660 hours of broadband Internet access during school vacation periods. HP may be the world's biggest PC maker, but the company still lags behind Lenovo Group in China. During 2006, the company was the fourth-largest PC maker in China, with a market share of 8.2 percent. HP's market share increased to 12.5 percent during the first quarter of 2007, thanks to aggressive notebook sales, Ma said