rPath

An insider's view on Red Hat's Qumranet acquisition

If you want an insider's view on Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet, you could hardly do better than to read Billy Marshall's commentary. Billy used to run North America sales for Red Hat and competes with Red Hat today from his perch at virtualization vendor rPath.

Billy writes:

With this acquisition, Red Hat is escalating the already fierce battle that is raging for control of the software layer that is rapidly replacing the general purpose OS as the access layer for hardware infrastructure. Qumranet is a very savvy acquisition by Red Hat because it plays to their … Read more

rPath plays the sucker for Novell and Microsoft

Paula Rooney at ZDnet reported on today's announcement that rPath has entered a pact with Novell that makes creating a virtual appliance easier for developers.

While I am not shocked that rPath is working with Novell instead of continuing with their own Linux flavor, I am completely shocked that Billy Marshall, rPath CEO and former Red Hat bigshot sales guy is citing the Microsoft patent protection as the reason why. Nothing is said about Suse being better in any way. Instead its about this unproven patent protection.

rPath's Appliance Builder has been running its own Linux since the … Read more

rPath on Red Hat's appliance strategy: "Some assembly required"

It's not surprising that Billy Marshall, former Red Hatter and current CEO of rPath, would be dismissive of Red Hat's new appliance operating system, given that he will be competing with it. But what I did find surprising is how dead-on his assessment is of enterprise software.

We talk about certification a lot (i.e., "Yes, we are certified to run on SQL Server"). The customer takes this to mean, "It will work well with SQL Server." But this isn't always the case. In fact, as Billy points out, it is often not the case:

According to Red Hat, the product will be a valuable alternative to rPath because it preserves application "certification." Apparently this means that customers will still need to assemble, configure, and maintain the components inside the virtual appliance. After all, "certification" is only valuable when the components are not provided as an integrated, optimized, and tested unit.… Read more