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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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 new low-cost desktop bundle runs Red Hat Enterprise and is aimed at small and medium-size businesses.
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Microsoft invited to improve Red Hat turned in a healthy first quarter amid signs it's evolving into a multifaceted operation, thanks to growing sales of JBoss and use of channel partners.â¦
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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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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat and Exadel are joining forces to try to make the open source Red Hat platform more of a destination for software developers. The two companies will offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat and Exadel said. "If you take a look at where Red Hat's business was a couple years ago, it was primarily around migration of production systems to Enterprise Linux," said Brian Che, Red Hat product manager. But now, Red Hat wants developers to build new applications, Che said. This week's announcement follows last year's purchase of JBoss as part of Red Hat's strategy. Through an arrangement being announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, Exadel will open source all of its products, including the Exadel Studio Pro Web development environment and the RichFaces AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components platform. Exadel Studio Pro, which is based on the Eclipse platform, will be renamed Red Hat Developer Studio. Also, Exadel's Ajax4jsf, which is a framework for JavaServer Faces applications that use AJAX, will be consolidated under the JBoss.org umbrella. Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of these projects and integrate them with JBoss middleware technologies such as the JBoss Seam application framework. In offering its products via open source, Exadel is seeking to increase awareness of its technologies and sell application-building services around them. "We believe that this gives us more visibility," said Donna Burke, Exadel vice president. Red Hat, meanwhile, will support the products itself. The Red Hat and Exadel arrangement provides a new twist on partnerships in that it is not an acquisition and provides just a potential for future revenues from services, said Raven Zachary, senior analyst with The 451 Group. "Here you've got two commercial firms exchanging IP (intellectual property) with only a promise of revenue-sharing in the future. It's a fascinating model," Zachary said. "There's a risk here for Exadel," in giving away its IP, but Exadel believes the move provides greater opportunities, Zachary said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf provide models for building rich Internet and Web 2.0 applications, Red Hat said. When combining these Exadel developer tools with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat can offer a development and deployment platform for developers to assemble SOA components and Web 2.0 applications with less coding, Red Hat and Exadel said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are available now as JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jsf on JBoss.org under the LGPL (Lesser GNU General Public License). Red Hat is working to open source Exadel Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio under the GNU GPL (General Public License), with availability planned for later in the first half of 2007. Red Hat also plans to introduce a Red Hat developer assistance program. The effort will feature a developer portal that at present has been known by the code name of 108. Also at EclipseCon, AccuRev plans to announce enhancements to its AccuBridge for Eclipse plug, allowing Eclipse developers to access AccuRev software configuration management functionality from within the Eclipse IDE. Performance and usability enhancements in version 4.5.1 of the plug-in include the ability to synchronize a local development workspace with other developers' changes, a customizable AccuRev perspective to view the collection of windows most important to developers, and support for the Eclipse Update Manager. AccuRev also plans to announce it has hired David Jabs as vice president of engineering. He was a founding architect of IBM Rational ClearCase while at Atria Software, AccuRev said.
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Sun Microsystems Inc.'s combative chief executive, Scott McNealy, fresh from resolving his long-running quarrel with archrival Microsoft Corp. , has found a new target for his wrath: Linux software maker Red Hat Inc.
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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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Not satisfied with its prominent position on servers and workstations, VMware charged the desktop with a new software package that creates &quot;containers&quot; of applications that can be centrally managed by an administrator.
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(InfoWorld) - The president of virtualization software leader VMwareÂ on Wednesday questioned the strategy of rivals that are integrating virtualization functionality into their operating systems. Diane Greene made the comments at the third and final day of the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. VMware, a subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, doubled revenue in EMC's latest quarterly report, compared to the year ago quarter, as enterprises embrace VMware's virtualization software to make more efficient use of the servers in their data centers. Rivals such as Red Hat and MicrosoftÂ have responded to VMware's dominance by integrating virtualization into coming new operating systems. Red Hat isÂ introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5Â next week and Microsoft's new Windows server OS is due later this year. But Greene, in discussing virtualization with analysts for the investment firm, said she wonders how effective the competition's virtualization features can be. "Traditionally, the operating system manages the hardware and manages the application. Once you virtualize with a hypervisor, that is now what is managing the hardware, not the OS," Greene said, in a presentation that was distributed via webcast. "Now the operating system is just managing the application. So certainly Windows and Red Hat are moving to integrate virtualization into their OS, but part of the value proposition seems to be lost when you do that." Spokespeople for Red Hat did not respond to a request for comment, but a spokesman for Microsoft said its OS easily supports virtualization. "Resource management has always been part of operating systems. Today, vendors such as Sun, Novell, and Red Hat incorporate virtualization into their operating systems," wrote Patrick O'Rourke, a senior product manager for Windows Server, in a prepared statement. "We are making investments across Microsoft to offer our customers a complete set of virtualization products from the desktop to the datacenter. All assets, both virtual and physical, [are] managed from a single platform." VMware is a strong contributor to the earnings of parent company EMC, which also sells storage hardware and security software. Greene also is executive vice president of EMC. Revenue for VMware increased to $232 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, 101 percent more than a year prior. The growth comes from increased demand for VMware Infrastructure 3, a virtualization software suite for servers and storage networks. VMware's growth prompted EMC to recently announce plans toÂ spin off 10 percent of VMwareÂ in an initial public offering of stock. EMC executives said they anticipate releasing the prospectus later this month for the IPO, expected about midyear. Greene noted the stock sale will benefit VMware employees as well as potential shareholders. "Our stock-based compensation will track our performance and that is the ideal model," she said. Also at the Morgan Stanley conference, Greene acknowledged that virtualizing servers, which helps them use more of their designed capacity, may suppress server sales growth. But she said many customers are upgrading servers as they introduce virtualization into their operations. Those new servers are more high-end products, with greater processing power, and should yield higher margins for server vendors. EMC reported fourth quarter 2006 financial results Jan. 23, posting net income of $389 million, or $0.17 a share, on revenue of $3.21 billion. It edged out analysts estimates of $0.16 a share.
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InfoWorld - Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.
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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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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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Sun and Microsoft are using a common strategy to attack a common enemy--Red Hat. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz fired a major counteroffensive against Linux nemesis Red Hat by unveiling hefty discounts on
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Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.At its JBoss World conference in Orlando, Florida, Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s Middleware Business, said the company hopes JBoss will be a major part of 50 percent of all enterprise software infrastructure deployments by 2015. &quot;We believe it is an achievable, realistic goal,&quot; he said.To reach that goal, Red Hat introduced a multifaceted plan that includes opening technology &quot;acceleration&quot; centers, adding sales and marketing support, and putting together an enterprise-class middleware stack. The stack would be made up of JBoss and other open-source software for management, application integration, and application development.Red Hat purchased JBoss in April 2006 and has been trying to integrate the Java-based application infrastructure, or middleware, with its Linux business to become a multiproduct company.In an interview last week, Red Hat&#39;s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said the hardest part of this has been changing JBoss&#39; business model to Red Hat&#39;s. JBoss gave its software away for free and charged for consulting and services. Red Hat has a &quot;.org&quot; community version of its product for anyone to use, as well as a more robust enterprise version for large-scale deployments. He said at the time that Red Hat now will use a similar model for making JBoss more successful in the enterprise.Muzilla echoed Whitehurst&#39;s notion that Red Hat will use the same strategy to boost JBoss in enterprises as it did to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux so successful. However, he said there is still &quot;a lack of understanding that you can really run your enterprise on open-source middleware.&quot;To change that perception, Red Hat plans to offer an &quot;enterprise-hardened, rock-solid&quot; stack of JBoss middleware that includes both existing products, such as JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss Transactions, JBoss Clustering, and JBoss Messaging, and other open-source products, Muzilla said Wednesday. Red Hat will test and certify the middleware stack to ensure the pieces work together and can sustain large-scale enterprise deployments, he said.Sales and customer support also are key to making a successful enterprise play, Muzilla said. In the past six months, Red Hat has added JBoss sales and presales specialists in North America to help sell the middleware to enterprises. The company also is hiring new marketing executives and is planning its first acceleration center. He said the centers will be in places &quot;where there is a lot of customer activity,&quot; without giving more details.Once the new technology labs for JBoss are open, customers will be able to use them to test Red Hat&#39;s JBoss stack, and it&#39;s likely Red Hat will build centers for a specific task, Muzilla said. &quot;Performance will be one lab, interoperability will be another,&quot; he said.
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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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Single installer Sun Microsystems is hoping to leverage the popularity of Red Hat's JBoss, with software making it easier to use NetBeans with the application server.â¦