Red Hat talks tough on competitors

Red Hat announced a range of cool new products and technologies last week at Red Hat Summit, but the most potent message emerging from the conference may well have been 'Diplomacy be damned!' Red Hat has generally opted to publicly ignore competitors, but not anymore. The company singled out Microsoft and Oracle, in particular. Is this a new, combative Red Hat?

Red Hat's DeltaCloud was the big technical news, offering a "common API to blend public and private clouds." It also announced a new Catalyst program to corral a partner ecosystem around its infrastructure products.

But for me, it was Red Hat's swipes at its competitors that are possibly more momentous. It's not that Red Hat never criticizes competitors: in 2006, for example, Red Hat declared the imminent death (wrongly, as it turns out) of Novell.

But there's a difference between criticizing pure competitors and those companies, like Oracle, that Red Hat both competes with in some markets and partners in others.

Hence, when Red Hat's executive vice president of products and technologies, Paul Cormier, singled out Microsoft Azure for its potential to lock in customers, this was an easy jab at a company that drives no Red Hat revenue.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's scorn for Oracle's technology strategy, however, has the potential to damage the companies' partnership:

Do you want to buy into Larry Ellison's vision of what your IT infrastructure should be and what functionality you should provide to your customers, or should you listen to your customers and be flexible?

This second critique has more sting because Red Hat and Oracle partner as much as they compete. Oracle first caused waves in the partnership by cloning Red Hat Enterprise Linux and undercutting Red Hat's pricing, but Red Hat's response ("It's a fork and not a particularly good one") was relatively muted. It had to be: Oracle's database certification for RHEL has long been a driver of RHEL sales.

Is this a sign of a new Red Hat, one that will not only talk down competitors but also be willing to take them down by entering competitor-partners' product markets?

I hope so. There's no way for Red Hat to grow without stepping on partners' toes. I'm not suggesting Red Hat should declare war on its partners, but it certainly needs to be willing to make partners uncomfortable, as it did by acquiring JBoss. It's a sign of a more competitive Red Hat.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[ewriter21]

Too bad he didn't tackle Oracle on a more credible front though. Are we to believe that in the history of proprietary vendors, Oracle or otherwise, that we've all bought what one man dreamed up as being good for us? To suggest that product management as a profession is a failure and hasn't taken into account the unmet needs of the markets they serve is more than a stretch. Oracle's vision and roadmap is no more the product of just Larry than Red Hat's is purely made up by the community. Both need shaping and alignment to what people need solved in order to be interesting to anyone.

[ushimitsudoki]

"It's not that Red Hat never criticizes competitors: in 2006, for example, Red Hat declared the imminent death (wrongly, as it turns out) of Novell."

I read the article you linked to. It contains none of the following words:
1. imminent
2. death
3. Novell

[jspaleta]

ushimitsudoki,

I concur, the referenced article has absolutely nothing to do with Novell at all. I think Matt linked to the wrong article entirely.

-jef

[jojomcleod]

Matt has a history of linking to articles that have nothing to do with the topic at hand as 'proof' and then failing to respond when the mistake is pointed out.

[jspaleta]

jojomcleod,

So who is the managing editor at C-Net that would have some editorial control over the accuracy of the "news" blogs under the cnet headline. I think I'd like to have a conversation with that person about CNet's policy with regard to publishing factual corrections.

-jef