Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them.
From the announcement:
Extended Update Support allows a customer with a large mission-critical deployment to reduce server administration and management costs by standardizing on a single update release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for up to 18 months--all while preserving stability and data security.
As Red Hat explains, most software companies allow customers to standardize on a minor, "point" release for 6 to 9 months, or at most 12 months. Through its Extended Update Support program, however, Red Hat is letting customers pick a Red Hat Enterprise Linux build and stick with it for up to 18 months, up to three times the industry average. That means less downtime and less need to re-validate software stacks running on RHEL.
The Register provides some additional insight:
While Red Hat commits seven years of support for a major RHEL version, the dot releases within the versions change about every six months. Within those dot releases, the company ensures application compatibility because it doesn't change the runtime environment, the area where the Linux kernel interacts with applications. So even if there are patches for security or bugs and whatnot in the dot release, customers do not have to go through application testing and certification, which can take many months, as long as they stay within a RHEL version.
This is a great service to Red Hat's customers, and provides further evidence that Red Hat's subscription model helps it to be more attuned to customer needs. Red Hat isn't selling an upfront license: it's selling the continued value of an ongoing subscription. By tuning that value to actual customer needs--in this case, the need to disturb production systems as little as possible to reduce risk and save money--Red Hat ensures renewals.
Subscription models align vendor interests with customer interests. Red Hat's Extended Update Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is setting the pace. It will be interesting to see who follows.
Open-source Web conferencing provider Dimdim has raised $6 million in Series B funding, the company is set to announce on Wednesday.
The funding round, which was led by current investors Index Ventures, Nexus India Capital, and Draper Richards, will enable Dimdim to introduce enhancements to the free service and expand its market reach.
Dimdim competes with fee-based services like Webex. Because it is open source, it could become a platform for real-time communications if it garners enough developer support, my CNET colleague Rafe Needleman predicts.
Since its private launch 10 months ago, Boston-based Dimdim has attracted more than 500,000 users in more than 180 countries, the company says.
On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide plans to announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there were hints of these projects at JavaOne earlier this year, Monday's announcement will add significant context to the work Orbitz has done to create two highly compelling open-source projects, whose applicability extends far beyond the travel industry.
Orbitz's operations center
(Credit: Orbitz Worldwide)On Friday, Orbitz gave me a preview of the announcement and the opportunity to talk with its sponsors, Winthrop Short, senior director of Orbitz Worldwide, and Matt O'Keefe, senior architect of Orbitz Worldwide. In talking with Winthrop and Matt, it's clear to me that Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's vision for enterprise collaboration through open-source communities is going to be led by companies like Orbitz, companies for whom technology is not necessary drudgery but rather competitive advantage.
Consider the following: Orbitz employs 1,600 full-time employees and has another 500 contractors. So, 2,100 people total. Half of this total number is made up of technologists. As Brian Hoyt, Orbitz Worldwide's vice president of corporate communications and government affairs told me, "We have always been a technology company, one that just happens to be really good at selling travel."
But why open source? What benefits does Orbitz derive from open-sourcing these projects? Why not keep ERMA and Graphite to themselves?
... Read moreRemember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that suggested there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market's disparate tastes via the Web.
Why sell a million copies of Led Zeppelin's Coda, when you can make a thriving business of selling two to three copies of your neighbor's garage band to Rick, two copies of a Nigerian band's tunes to Susan, and so on?
As new research highlighted in Harvard Business Review suggests, the answer may well be that the real money is in the blockbuster, not the long tail, after all:
Meanwhile, our research also showed that success is concentrated in ever fewer best-selling titles at the head of the distribution curve. From 2000 to 2005 the number of titles in the top 10 percent of weekly sales dropped by more than 50 percent--an increase in concentration that is common in winner-take-all markets. The importance of individual best sellers is not diminishing over time. It is growing....
... Read more
The Economist's Ludwig Siegele opens up one of the most important questions for the next 10 years of software: What happens to Microsoft after Bill Gates leaves?
In Ray Ozzie's (and, perhaps, Microsoft's) view, Microsoft's new goal is the same as the old goal: dominate everything. But the battle has shifted to the "cloud" now. Complicating the matter further, Microsoft no longer has a technical leader, one who combines vision, tenacity, and introspection. Instead it has an aggressive, sometimes bumbling bloodhound of a CEO, Steve Ballmer.
Can Mr. Protect-My-Desktop-Monopoly-By-Whatever-Means-Necessary really push Microsoft to the future? Can Ballmer deliver on this goal? According to Siegele, Microsoft's goal:
...is to become the dominant force in the forthcoming era of cloud computing--or, to refresh Microsoft's original mission: "to supply services to every desk, to every home and to every hand."
To understand what that means, and the difficulties it poses Microsoft, start with the idea that computing is undergoing one of its great periodic shifts....Now communications is catching up with hardware and software and, thanks to cheap broadband and wireless access, the industry is witnessing a pull back to the middle. This is leading much computing to migrate back into huge data centers. Networks of these computing plants form "computing clouds"--vast, amorphous, delocalized nebulae of processing power and storage.
This is a huge opportunity for Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and others. But only Microsoft brings a massive ball-and-chain to the party called the Windows desktop business, which accounts for the vast majority of its revenue and pervades its company culture. The very thing that makes Microsoft so successful may well ensure that it will play a bit part in the future of computing.
... Read moreRed Hat continues to impress with strong financial performance, delivering an impressive Q1 2009. Not bad when you consider the company gives away its products for free.
Red Hat pulled in $156.6 million in its Q1 (fiscal year 2009), a 32 percent increase over Q1 2008 and 11 percent growth over Q4 2008. Red Hat's operating income was also up 33 percent over the same quarter in 2008. But it's perhaps the deferred revenue (i.e., subscriptions and other services booked but not yet recognizable as revenue because they have yet to be delivered) that is most impressive: Up 36 percent to $491.8 million.
Clearly, Red Hat is doing something right. Many things right, in fact.
I asked the company specifically about JBoss performance, as rumors have swirled that JBoss has lagged under Red Hat's guidance. Quite the opposite. While there were initial hiccups in bringing the JBoss brand under the Red Hat umbrella, the unit is firing on all cylinders now, contributing a healthy amount to the Red Hat top and bottom lines. Red Hat wouldn't give specific numbers, but I heard the JBoss confidence from a range of different sources within Red Hat.
What about the cost side of the equation? Here there is perhaps even more cause for optimism, but also a creeping concern.
... Read moreAt lunch with Michael Coté from RedMonk on Wednesday, we talked a lot about how open source has really split into "free" and "open source," with the former typically associated with basement developers and Apache licenses, and the latter generally associated with the General Public License and some set of enhanced features.
As I was following Coté's Twitter feedearlier, I started to wonder whether everything really will go to the cloud and all of our open-source musing will go away, as software becomes consumed versus installed.
Realistically, there is a vast array of software that really can't move outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future. Consider, for example, banking and stock-trading systems, or telecommunications infrastructure. On the other hand, consider pretty much everything else. Even when you take into account the complexities of back-office systems, odds are that in a green-field situation, you could find a software-as-a-service application to solve your problems.
So here's the paradox that I think about: Let's consider a company like Google, which writes, buys, and installs a lot of software. Some is unique to its business and isn't available as an online service. Other products are packaged applications. Yet it wants the rest of the world to stop buying software, instead just consuming it from Google.
I'm not seeing a way that on-premise software disappears forever...
In a clear indicator that open source is having an impact well beyond software, Harvard Medical School's CIO, Dr. John Halamka, recently went on the record at the Red Hat Summit arguing that open source points the way to better healthcare. In this, however, he wasn't talking about software per se, but rather about the community approach to tackling what appears to be a gargantuan problem:
Online medical records.
This seems like an easy task, right? Scan them in and save the documents online. Google Health is doing it, right? How hard can it be?
Very hard, it turns out. But open source provides some clues as to how to resolve the issue, as Dr. Halamka suggests:
Healthcare interoperability requires open standards, developed in a transparent way, by a community. It requires reusable components and tools which accelerate technical connectivity and data sharing. The Open Source movement embraces all these principles....[S]o I welcome their contributions to the work connecting payers, providers and patients.
How do you manage a disparate group of self-interested actors? Open source. How do you take care of breaking up the overarching task into bite-sized pieces? Open source. How do you get US healthcare records online? Open source, according to one of the experts in the business.
The Linux Foundation is trying to push Nvidia to make its graphics drivers more accessible. The Foundation's beef: closed drivers make Linux look unstable to end users.
Though a statement issued Monday does not cite Nvidia by name, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair James Bottomley cited Nvidia in a phone interview. "My intent is to point out the problems Nvidia has been causing themselves with their binary-only (drivers)," he said. "They are certainly one of the few companies sticking to a binary-only strategy." Binary-only means the drivers are essentially closed.
"We...consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable," the official statement begins. "Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors."
But Bottomley gets much more specific than this. "Their (Nvidia's) binary module is one of the top causes of kernel crashes, which makes Linux look bad," he said.
"Nvidia does a reasonable job of Q-and-A-ing (quality assurance) of a certain number of configurations but the problem is that their configurations (are) a lot less than what's actually out there on the market," Bottomley said.
In the past, Intel had been the target of open-source advocates, but the chipmaker is now a leading open-source code provider. And graphics-chip supplier ATI Technologies, acquired in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices, is open source too, Bottomley said. He did, however, cite some outstanding problems with an ATI "FireGL" driver.
"It's basically a reflection of the fact that graphics is one of the most complex and most difficult areas of technology that sits in a computer nowadays," he added.
Nvidia says it provides a high-quality Linux driver. "Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver," Nvidia said in a response to an e-mail query.
But the graphics chip maker defends its binary-only policy. "Nvidia's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software," according to Nvidia.
"We try to make things open source whenever it makes sense," Nvidia said. The company cited examples here and here.
"To assume that customers won't have access to open-source updates from Linux kernel.org if they use closed source modules is not correct," Nvidia said. "Nvidia's Linux graphics driver kernel module is structured so that all the code that is Linux-specific is provided in source code as a 'kernel interface layer.' When customers upgrade their kernel to get the latest from kernel.org, they have everything they need to rebuild (and even patch, if necessary) the Nvidia's driver's kernel interface layer."
See: Linux developers petition for open Linux kernel drivers and ZDNet report here.
A look at Google's Android mobile operating system.
(Credit: Google)Last we heard, we'd be seeing phones powered by Google's Android open-source software in the second half of 2008. A report Monday from The Wall Street Journal has narrowed that down somewhat: Those handsets will start appearing in the fourth quarter of this year, a later time frame than expected.
And according to the Journal, some handset manufacturers are "struggling" to get Android on track even for a fourth-quarter launch. Sprint Nextel and China Mobile, the world's largest cell carrier, reportedly won't be able to put out Android-powered phones until next year. Other carriers, like T-Mobile, claim their Android phones are still on track.
Some developers of mobile applications, on the other hand, have been sidetracked by the announcement of the iPhone 3G, the second-generation version of Apple's ubiquitous handsets. With a lower price point, a developer kit already released, and a concrete launch date of July 11, not to mention faster Web access and a built-in GPS chip, the appeal of the new iPhone may have pushed Android to the back burner for some companies.
