Red Hat to collide with Microsoft
For years, Red Hat has happily sold Linux to Unix shops anxious to save money at equivalent or better performance. During this time, the company largely avoided Microsoft, which has tended to compete much higher up the stack. No longer. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer argues that one of Microsoft's biggest opportunities lies in enterprise infrastructure and associated application development.
Red Hat, meet Redmond.
Red Hat wants to own the infrastructure market. The company is nearing its initial $1 billion goal, but has a far more audacious ambition: own half the associated middleware market.
This is a direct challenge to Microsoft, especially the manner in which Red Hat aims to go about it. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst noted in the company's earnings call earlier this year, Red Hat is "laser-like focused on that mission of commoditizing these key (infrastructure) layers" through open source.
It's not a strategy that will endear the open-source agitator to Microsoft.
After all, Microsoft is also focused on these opportunities, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told TechCrunch:
Biggest opportunity that we never talked about is enterprise infrastructure. Most of that goes to the database and mainframe vendors today who are in the business. We've got four billion in revenue and yet we're a small market share player.
Servers, there are going to be more new applications written in the next five years than any five-year period of time.
The two companies can't help but run into each other. Will they also be able to collaborate? They must. No customer is going to exclusively run either Microsoft or Red Hat technologies. The two have showed an ability to get along, if only a little bit. Can the two come together even as they seek to beat each other to bloody pulps?
Time will tell. But the market is about to get very interesting again. To achieve its goals, Red Hat must increase its investment in JBoss to make it an even better application platform that can effectively compete with Microsoft and its comprehensive infrastructure/middleware/tools suite.
As it does so, it's going to bump into Microsoft SharePoint, which is increasingly used as a platform for building applications, much like Red Hat's JBoss application server. SharePoint has come under threat from Google recently, but this is a battle Red Hat will have to fight, too.
As for Microsoft, I can't see how it can hope to compete with Red Hat's open-source strategy without including a healthy dose of open source, itself. Figuring out how to maintain its profit margins and sales potential, while simultaneously encouraging the growth of its developer ecosystem, is going to be difficult without open source.
It's a battle for the heart and soul of the enterprise, and it's going to get a little messy. It's about time.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
While I do personally feel that Linux is a superior Server Platform, I am unwilling to adapt and convert my systems over to it for the simple reason that administration of the product is still limited to strictly those with substantial knowledge of the OS. I can have a Windows Admin up to speed in a few weeks, but even after a year of working directly with Linux I still run into a number of road blocks, and support online is nearly impossible to find without hours of searches.
It seems someone's just not ready to put in the same effort with Linux as they expect their employees to with Windows.
You must be joking. Either you've never touched a Linux server, you're an astroturfer, or you're a complete incompetent. Everyone else in this thread covered the big reasons as to why.
Do this test, search for "Microsoft application deployment" and then search for "Linux application deployment"... then tell me which Google results comes with more useful links on deploying applications in either of these environments. More often than not, you can always find more useful content and from an authoritative source for the Microsoft platform than you will for the Linux platform. Even if you change it to "deploying Linux applications" or "deploying Windows applications"... no matter how you word it, you will always find better content for Windows.
I'm not kidding. Anyone who needs to google this stuff needs to be kept away from servers of any kind. I suppose another great example would be application control via executable signature whitelists and other security restrictions via GPOs.
While I agree that they will inevitably run into each other head to head, Red Hat still has more then ample white space left when it comes to commoditizing the Java App server market. Only when they finish driving the inefficiencies out of that market do they need to worry about taking share from .NET. I think you're right that they have more to gain through interop, at least for the next 5+ years. Our data tells us 60% of global 2000 shops develop for both Java and .NET. You'd think they'd gravitate toward a less expensive solution that integrates better instead of expensive app servers that don't. The win for Microsoft is that is frees up more $ to be spent on the Windows platform instead of expensive app server licenses.
Now as to the costs of Microsoft'ssoftware licenses, if they can build the cost of Windows/.NET into the hosting costs of the cloud and get economies of scale in the power and hardware dimensions, they they could potentially obviate the capital cost advantage of OSS. This is certainly achievable in the next 5 years given the evolution of the market.
Jeffrey
- by Urban Terrorist October 2, 2009 9:40 PM PDT
- Matt,
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(11 Comments)You are missing a couple of points, which put more pressure on Microsoft.
1) Apple released it's Calendaring and Email Servers under an Open Source license.
2) Microsoft is having financial problems due to the U.S. economic slowdown, which will limit the amount of money it can spend on this market.
3) I don't know how to put this politely - but Microsoft is, and has always been totally incompetent at customer service, and unless Ballmer fixes this, they won't do well.
Now I could be wrong. But I don't think so. Microsoft has never done well when it has competition, and without major changes in upper management I don't see this changing.