Q&A: Red Hat CEO believes Delta past isn't a liability
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Jim Whitehurst, 40, thinks his experience as Delta's COO will help him turn Red Hat into a big company. Also, he talks the open-source talk.
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Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT), provider of Linux software and support, has issued a security alert to its customers. E-mails are circulating, says the company, that appear to come from Red Hat but actually are phishing hoaxes.
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Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, in a statement the company issued, said the assets have &quot;tremendous longterm strategic value for the open source industry&quot; and his company.
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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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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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The chief executive of Delta Air Lines Inc. said Thursday a tentative pact the company has reached with its pilots for $1 billion in concessions doesn&#39;t mean the struggling carrier is out of the woods in terms of avoiding bankruptcy.
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(InfoWorld) - The Linux faithful might be staring down the barrel of another round of Microsoft's legal taunts, but at last week's Linux Foundation Summit, the reaction was more ho-hum than oh-no. "The reality is that they are not going to sue a single customer," says Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "It would not be in their business interest. Microsoft is not going to sue their customers." Zemlin says one fact alone â that most corporate Linux users have a mixed environment with Microsoft software â will protect users from the software giant going after them based on patent infringement. The patent issue has risen to near the top of the Linux Foundation's list with the signing last year of a cross-licensing patent deal between Novell and Microsoft, in which Microsoft promised not to sue Novell Suse Linux users for patent infringement. Several similar deals have followed since with Linux vendors Xandros and Linspire. As part of its charter, the Linux Foundation offers legal-protection services for developers to safeguard the future of Linux. Microsoft claims that Linux violates 235 of its patents, although it has yet to detail what those patents are. Critics contend the issue is meant to create uncertainty among potential corporate Linux adopters. But Zemlin says the contracts are hurting Linux "only in the fact that Microsoft uses them to create a perception of risk that in reality is not there." Many others at the foundation's first-ever summit -- a collection of some of the most influential Linux kernel designers, software developers, and user companies -- took that same position. "Open source is safe for us to use: That is the message that I want to get out there," said Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager. "I would be shocked if Microsoft didn't have patents that read on Linux," said Mark Radcliffe, a partner at law firm DLA Piper US who advises companies on intellectual property issues. "Will they enforce them is the question. Companies using Linux don't have to fear patent suits." Radcliffe thinks Microsoft is in a difficult position because it probably couldn't avoid spearing its own customers with any legal action. "I think the Microsoft [Novell] deal was a misfire," he says. "I think what Microsoft's actions recognize is that Linux is here to stay. And any competitor will use tools to try and slow it down." Others say that patents have become a real problem for the computer industry. "They are sold to the public as being about supporting innovation, but their impact on industry is a nightmare," says Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux. "They don't help IBM, they don't help Sun, and they don't help Microsoft. But the free software guys are worried about this." So worried, that the Free Software Foundation added to its near-final GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0 specific language that addresses patent deals that could erode the unique open source qualities of the Linux operating system. The hype has reached such proportions that Dan Frye, vice president of Linux and open technology at IBM and head of its Linux Technology Center, said during a panel session at last week's summit, "everybody, just chill when v3 comes out." GNU GPL 3.0 is slated for final release on June 29. Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who is employed by the Linux Foundation, wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list last week that the Linux kernel may stay under Version 2, which he said is a better license, but that Sun's choice of licensing for open-sourcing Solaris could influence the decision. The Linux kernel is made up of a number of components, developed by various individuals under a number of different open source licenses, which means all those stakeholders would have to agree to switch to Version 3. "People are looking to Linus for that kind of leadership," says Google's DiBona. "I think v3 will be evolutionary, which is what it is supposed to be." Others say the issue of GPL 3.0 license adoption goes much deeper than just patent concerns. "Even if v3 is better than v2, it has to be significantly better to undertake all the pain to change the kernel code [licensing]," said James Bottomley, a kernel developer and CTO of SteelEye Technology, which makes high-availability software for Linux systems. "We are not going to waste six months to change the kernel. This is a pragmatic argument, not a legal one."ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Blog: What challenges does the CEO of an open source company face? Matt Asay finds out.
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Whatever pleasantries once existed between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have vanished. This won&#39;t come as a shock to many of you.
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When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company&#39;s new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst&#39;s chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.
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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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In a statement released yesterday, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian found himself distancing his company's stance from that of Microsoft, its newfound partner. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer believes Novell's paying for its intellectual property, on behalf of Linux customers who might otherwise be sued.
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Red Hat chairman and chief executive Matthew Szulik said in a statement: &quot;Directory Server and Certificate Management System have already been widely deployed in the enterprise and are mature
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[World News] New York, Sep 24, : Sanjay Kumar, former CEO of New York-based software giant Computer Associates, has pleaded not guilty to charges of defrauding investors by fudging records.
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No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the âI didnât know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doingâ defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just wonât do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --Â  Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates, during an appearance here Friday at the Computer History Museum, expressed no fear of Linux usurping Windows in the software industry.
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NEW YORK  - Delta Air Lines appeared to have averted imminent bankruptcy with a cost-saving deal with its pilots union, but still faces challenges ahead, analysts said.