Red Hat

The secrets of Ubuntu's success

I've written on this topic before, but came across this list of seven reasons for Ubuntu's success that I thought were worth noting.

The Linux distribution battle will come down to two distributions: Red Hat and Ubuntu. Red Hat is the market leader while Ubuntu is arguably the community leader (though Fedora is also coming back strong). How has Ubuntu managed to make such a significant impression on the market, despite its late start?

Having talked about a few of the other reasons on this blog, I'll call out two that I missed:… Read more

Red Hat growth: A tale of 2,000 applications

Red Hat's Linux business continues to boom, even when we don't give it the credit that it deserves. What is the underlying reason for that growth?

Applications.

Back when I was at Novell, in its early days of SUSE, we were frantic to catch up to Red Hat in the applications arms race. It was the reason we lost deals back then, more than any other reason.

Today, Red Hat is highlighting the history of its application certification program, and it's well worth a read. Behind the words, however, is a tale of big (and growing) numbers:… Read more

Improving Red Hat's JBoss numbers

Red Hat is struggling to get the value its expected from JBoss. That was clear from its earnings report yesterday and Matthew Szulik's comments:

"The rate of JBoss bookings has not met my expectations," Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said on the company's second fiscal quarter 2008 conference call. "We expect it could double RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux], so far it's about the same. We will accelerate JBoss growth in the second half of the year."

What can Red Hat do to boost its JBoss business? Is the sky falling?… Read more

Red Hat blows out its numbers - is its future homegrown?

Despite some negative anticipation of Red Hat's earnings call, Red Hat continued to show why it's the open-source market maker with profit growing 64% and sales rising 28% to $127.3 million in its second quarter. Oracle can announce a few stray customers for its Unbreakable Linux, and Novell can report 77% growth (to hit $21 million last quarter) in its Linux revenue, but Red Hat continues to set the pace.

And a frenetic pace it is, as Bloomberg reports:… Read more

Red Hat in flux?

Jason Maynard at Credit Suisse is downgrading Red Hat's stock from "outperform" to "neutral." Interestingly, his downgrade isn't based on Red Hat's financial performance for this quarter, but rather stems from alleged turmoil in Red Hat's personnel. In other words, he sees the company hitting some speed bumps on its road to JBoss integration that will show up in third and fourth quarter numbers:

We are downgrading shares of Red Hat to Neutral from Outperform and trimming our price target to $22. The downgrade is based on lack of conviction in our original thesis that field execution would gradually improve and the JBoss product line would experience a meaningful uptick in sales. Our checks indicate that the organization continues to be in a state of flux as the company works through its transition to a multi-product company. These struggles appear to be more pronounced than we had anticipated and will likely take longer to fix. In our opinion, these challenges are largely fixable but it won't happen overnight....… Read more

Solaris raring for a fight with Linux

And we thought it was all about peace, love, and...Solaris. But no, Sun is gearing up for one of the classic open source battles. We've had the various Linux distributions duking it out, and we've had MySQL versus PostgreSQL. Now we're getting Solaris versus Linux, and this is a fight that I believe may actually be worth having.

Why? Because it means more choice for customers, and not just any choice, but a choice between two exceptional operating systems, both completely open source.

Sun's strategy is becoming clearer with Solaris:… Read more