Red Hat opens support and R&D center in Serbia
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat, in collaboration with IBM, opened a support and research facility in Vrsac, Serbia, to serve customers in South Eastern Europe. The center will be managed by VDEL, an IT services distribution company, and will provide support, development and educational services to Red Hat customers, partners and developers in the region. IBM will offer the center access to its technologies and knowledge base so that in the future the center can also support IBM's open source products. The companies will use the center to promote their security offerings since they have both earned security certificates for Common Criteria 4+, an international set of guidelines that companies can use to evaluate IT security. Red Hat and IBM also expect that the center will help stimulate the development and implementation of open source software in Serbia, boost educational programs in the sciences through IT innovations and help bridge the digital gap by developing programs supporting digital literacy in schools and lower income communities. The center is the result of an initiative launched in 2005 by the University of Belgrade to create an incubator for new technologies. That resulted in IBM, Red Hat and VDEL opening a Linux innovation and education center at the university which offered education, training and certification on Red Hat and IBM technologies. The center trained potential workers for the new support center launched on Monday. The city of Vrsac provided infrastructure and facilities for the center. Red Hat chose Vrsac for its infrastructure, location, and multiethnic and multicultural environment. The growth potential of the Serbian market and nearby regions was also an attraction, it said.
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Release of a new Linux distribution and other software boost Red Hat's first quarter earnings.
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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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Government support for open source is helping Red Hat grow its business in the Asia-Pacific region.
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The introduction of a new version of its Linux distribution and new JBoss software helped Red Hat increase profit to $16.2 million, or $0.08 a share, on revenue of $118.9 million in its fiscal first quarter ended May 31, the company reported Wednesday.
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Company co-founder explains why the Linux company chose the name Red Hat.
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Red Hat follows Novell's lead with Xen-enabled Linux beta, as Ubuntu's founder aims for success in emerging markets.
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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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Red Hat on Thursday announced the opening of its first office in China, in the nation&#39;s capital, Beijing. The company said it will be working with industry partners such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel and
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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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Linux distributor Red Hat Inc has established a new presence in China to promote the use of open source software in the country, following up on plans announced back in January.
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Red Hat is using JBoss World 2008 in Orlando as a launching pad for a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform designed to accelerate the deployment of open-source middleware by larger enterprises.
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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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(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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TechWeb - IBM and Red Hat will work together in helping independent software vendors get application certification on Red Hat's Linux server software.
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On Tuesday, Red Hat-owned JBoss and Paris-based services provider Bull announced a partnership to develop new middleware technologies for service-oriented architectures (SOAs).
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InfoWorld - Red Hat and Hyperic have formed an open-source project for developing a core set of IT infrastructure management capabilities, the companies announced Thursday.