Red Hat

Open-source companies log impressive growth

Even as the global economy tanks, open-source companies continue to soar. A range of open-source companies reported sales and community growth this past week, including:

Funambol: As announced on its Web site, Funambol's mobile open-source community has grown 2,000 percent, downloads are up 34 percent, and the number of active Funambol servers is up 42 percent in the past three months alone. Actuate: While business intelligence vendor Actuate's overall license revenues grew 15 percent last quarter, its BIRT (i.e., open source) revenue grew 32 percent. Linux Desktop: While there's no one company behind Linux for … Read more

Which software vendors are the most relevant?

My post on Tuesday suggesting that Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft are the last remaining big (software) ecosystem vendors caused a stir. "But what about EMC, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, Adobe Systems, Symantec, and...X?" came the flustered responses.

HP's public-relations firm even took the time to send me this plug for HP's software business:

IT management software is critical for enterprises to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. As the leading IT management software vendor (according to Gartner, Forrester, and IDC), HP's software solutions helps customers manage IT … Read more

Products, services, and open source

On the elevator Wednesday, I overheard (OK, I was snooping) two businessmen talking about a career change one of them had recently made:

I got out of the services world because I wanted to be able to touch my product. I figured it would be easier to compete if I could point to my product and tell a prospective customer, "See, this is why it's better."

The only problem with the product world is that my competitors can also see/touch my product, and copy it. I've discovered the product world is perhaps even harder to … Read more

Software's Big Four: Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft

Enterprise software is coming down to four big choices: Cisco Systems or IBM or Oracle or Microsoft.

Hewlett-Packard? HP is doing very well in hardware, but it lacks the overarching software strategy that fuels these other four.

Even as the industry consolidates into these big ecosystem vendors, it's becoming ripe for a new kind of hegemonic, all-out war.

It's a fun time to be in the industry. For one thing, it's fascinating to watch (and, in some cases, assist) each of the Big Four to use open source as a strategic club with which to pummel their … Read more

Oracle can help Sun, but will it lose MySQL?

The Register paints a very unflattering picture of Sun Microsystems' alleged mismanagement of its hardware and software assets.

Unfortunately, there's likely a lot of truth to the argument, though it's easy to point fingers from the outside and tell others what to do.

But this is precisely why Sun should be grateful for Oracle's acquisition of its assets: Oracle needn't appease internal or customer lobbies. It just needs to determine what pays the bills, and shutter or sell everything that doesn't.

The one open question for me, however, remains MySQL. Oracle could do much with … Read more

Just how strong is Red Hat's open-source business?

Red Hat stands alone as the only significant public open-source company. Is this a testament to its execution, or is it a hint that open source is not well-suited to big business?

While I believe that open source will increasingly be the heart of many big technology businesses, it will almost certainly feed new entrants to markets, not incumbent vendors.

Looking at Red Hat's report on its most recent fiscal year (FY 2009), however, suggests that for these new entrants, open source can be a very profitable business indeed. I've already reported on the high-level financial results.

What … Read more

Novell, Sun, and Red Hat: Three degrees of open source

Red Hat is an open-source company, while Novell is not, as Novell's CEO and CFO both emphasized in Novell's most recent earnings call. Sun, for its part, was desperately trying to reinvent itself as an open-source company, but struggled to do so given the weight of its declining hardware businesses.

Only Red Hat has managed to thrive as an open-source company while achieving significant scale of revenues.

Open source, it turns out, proves to be a much easier business strategy for upstarts than incumbents: it's hard to thrive on open-source prices unless your business is architected from … Read more

An outline of patent problems--and solutions

Patents have become a minefield that inhibit software innovation, a fact recently highlighted for me in a conversation with Rob Tiller, Red Hat's vice president of Intellectual Property and assistant general counsel.

Many software patents are of poor quality and are difficult to interpret, Tiller explains, made worse by the fact that patent boundaries are often vague: a patent can even cover an invention the patent holder never conceived.

Compounding this morass, it's difficult to impossible to know if code you have written could be covered by a patent, as search methods are unreliable (and damages are structured … Read more

Red Hat pulls a Microsoft, goes after the channel

While proprietary file formats and illegal tying have no doubt contributed to Microsoft's dominant market position in operating systems, office productivity suites, and more, the real secret to Microsoft's success is the channel. Take away Microsoft's exceptional channel execution--up to 96 percent of Microsoft's revenue comes through partners--and you take away Microsoft's market dominance.

It's therefore not surprising that Red Hat, Microsoft's rising open-source competitor, has been aggressively focusing on its channel, culminating in this week's announcement that it has created the Open Source Channel Alliance, by which it will … Read more