Red Hat, Fujitsu sign partnership

Fujitsu on Thursday said it has signed an agreement with Red Hat under which the companies plan to jointly develop and market Red Hat's Linux for Fujitsu's Intel-based computers.

Red Hat has sales, development and support partnerships with three top server makers--IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer--and is working on a deal with Sun Microsystems. While Fujitsu lacks those competitors' market share, it does have a strong position in Asia, where Red Hat is trying to expand.

Unlike Red Hat's deals with the other server companies, Fujitsu will fund engineers working at the Linux seller's offices worldwide, whose job will be to improve the operating system, the companies said. The programmers will focus on improvements to performance, stability and the ability to run on large servers with heavy processing loads.

The companies will work to ensure Fujitsu's software and hardware works with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family. The agreement involves Fujitsu servers built on Intel Xeon or Itanium processors.

Products of the partnership will emerge with the debut of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, scheduled for this fall, Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said. At that time, the company plans to release versions of its operating system for IBM's full server line and for servers running Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor.