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.
Red 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 moreRed Hat has been talking about open sourcing its Network for well over a year. Today, it finally did it.
However, code by itself is only moderately interesting. What we need now is a thriving community around "Project Spacewalk," as Red Hat calls the Network project.
Why? Well, because in some ways the commercial open-source community increasingly fragments as it matures financially. What is the first thing that MySQL and JBoss did to add value to their support subscriptions? Build networks. What, presumably, will be the first things that other open-source companies do? Build networks.
What is the result? A swamp of incompatible service-delivery networks.
Now consider the power for Red Hat if its Spacewalk actually served as a gathering point - an integration point - for the commercial open-source community? Powerful.
... Read moreFollowing on its successful launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service, Red Hat is now offering the JBoss Application Server on EC2.
It's yet another example of open source truly becoming a Web-enabled service, rather than a mass of packaged bits and bytes. And it comes at a reasonable price:
Red Hat is charging a fixed subscription rate of $119 per month for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, or a variable fee, starting at $1.21 per instance, per hour, with fees depending on the size, bandwidth, and storage of the services purchased...Customers can either license JBoss on EC2 from Amazon and receive a virtual image of the software, or make their own subscription of JBoss available on Amazon's compute cloud.
The more Red Hat and others can deliver their software as Web services, the less trouble there will be with getting a fair return on R&D investment in commercial open source. It makes a development service into a Web service, which looks an awful lot like a product that people are used to buying. Maybe an answer to Savio's fair critique?
Red Hat announced on Wednesday that it has reached a settlement with Firestar Software and DataTern over a patent infringement lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed two years ago in a U.S. District Court in Texas, centered on Firestar's patent for linking object-oriented software with relational databases.
Firestar, in its lawsuit, had alleged that JBoss, which Red Hat had acquired, violated its patent with the JBoss Hibernate 3.0 object-relational mapping tool for Java. Hibernate 3.0 had an open license.
Under the settlement, whose financial terms were not disclosed, all software distributed under Red Hat's brands and predecessor versions are covered, as well as Red Hat customers that use the software. The software protects derivative works, or combination products, that use covered products from the patent claim.
"Typically, when a company settles a patent lawsuit, it focuses on getting safety for itself," Rob Tiller, Red Hat's assistant general counsel of intellectual property, said in a statement. "But that was not enough for us; we wanted broad provisions that covered our customers."
DataTern became involved in the lawsuit after Firestar assigned the patent to DataTern.
EnterpriseDB, known for its products based on the open-source Postgres database, today announced that it has named Ed Boyajian, former Red Hat vice president and general manager of North American sales, as president, and chief executive, and board member.
Current CEO Andy Astor will take on the global business development role and focus on building out new markets.
Congrats to EnterpriseDB for scoring such a high-profile executive and to Ed on his new role.
Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld tries to parse what makes open-source buyers tick, and how to generate more of them. In so doing, he suggests that the real battleground is over those enterprises with both money and expertise to go it alone with open-source software (so-called "Category B" customers).
Why should they bother buying support when they can self-support?
For me, this isn't the right question. Using his MySQL-derived customer classification system, the real question is, "Can proprietary software serve Category A (companies with more time than money) at all?" and "Can open source more efficiently serve Categories B and C too?"
Implicit in Rodrigues' reasoning is, I think, a belief that if the software is proprietary, A, B, and C companies will all eventually just say, "Aw, shucks. I've got time/expertise/money, but what does it matter, I just have to pay anyway!" So the vendor cleans up on all three.
In fact, my own experience suggests that B companies buy less and less proprietary software (E*Trade is an example). Ditto goes for B, and C companies are willing to pay, anyway, so where is the conflict with open-source business models?
... Read moreThe Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.
To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").
It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.
So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.
The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.
... Read moreRed Hat likes Linux on the desktop, but it also likes making money.
The company's desktop software unit on Wednesday released an update on its plans, saying it will focus its efforts on specific markets but not face off against Microsoft in the consumer market.
The Linux Desktop team explained:
An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops, this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative.
Instead, Red Hat is focusing on desktop software that works with its server products aimed at businesses and developers.
A product called Red Hat Global Desktop that is targeted specifically at resellers, which focus on emerging markets, has been delayed for almost a year because of business issues. The company hopes to release it "soon," according to its corporate blog.
One year ago, Linux kernel development was almost predominately Red Hat's game. Today, Red Hat's lead has dipped considerably, according to a report just released by the Linux Foundation.
Red Hat continues to contribute/sponsor 11.2 percent of the Linux kernel's development, down from 14.4 percent in 2007, while Novell has jumped from an anemic 3.6 percent in 2007 to a robust 8.9 percent in 2008.
(Credit:
Linux Foundation)
Perhaps not surprisingly, Novell's share of the Linux market has grown considerably in that same time, with Novell reporting a 200 percent increase in its Linux business over the past year.
So, while Novell crows about its rise in revenue market share in the Linux market, it's the company's development market share that I view as the true leading indicator of its business. Linux sales are up 200 percent, while Linux development is up 250 percent. See a correlation?
In open source, it's all about "owning" the source of code, not necessarily the source code.
Importantly, it's not just Novell and Red Hat who contribute. As detailed statistics demonstrate, the Linux kernel is perhaps the world's largest, most distributed development effort, reflecting its increasing importance to an ever-widening array of disparate parties:
... Read more
