As the former COO at Delta Air Lines during its bankruptcy proceedings, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst knows something about making tough choices in the executive chair. His voice is worth hearing as we continue to swim through one of the worst economic economic crises in the history of the United States.
In an interview with the E-Commerce Times, Whitehurst outlines a few of his guiding management principles, but one struck me as particularly useful in understanding where Red Hat's product strategy could be going:
The key to steering a company past difficult obstacles is to focus on a few initiatives. "A key lesson, that I think is really important and really hard for business leaders to do, is to prioritize and pick two or three things and knock the cover off the ball. You see it over and over and over again where companies try to do too much."
I read this to suggest that it's unlikely Red Hat is going to be straying too far from its infrastructure roots in the near term. While the company has been experimenting with various programs for engaging the open-source ISV community like RHX, it's unlikely that Red Hat itself will be entering the application fray in earnest anytime soon. With JBoss significantly outpacing RHEL sales, perhaps this will change, but not during the downturn.
For the foreseeable future, watch for Red Hat to double down on its existing investments and, once those carry it through this recession, turn up the heat on its competition by aggressively moving beyond core infrastructure offerings.
The Red Hat team has posted an interesting analysis of RHX on its one-year anniversary. RHX has gone through a range of changes over the past year, many of which I've seen firsthand as a participant in the RHX program through Alfresco.
The RHX post offers insight for any company thinking of rolling out a new product. Among my favorite thoughts from the post:
Despite our research and planning, v1.0 of RHX was not the home run we anticipated. It turned out that enterprise customers, not small businesses, were most interested in RHX. In order to serve enterprises properly, we had to change almost every aspect of the offering. By September, we de-emphasized the e-commerce option, introduced high touch sales, 24×7 support, and custom stacks. We also built virtual appliances to make the trial process a little less painful. Within 90 days of these changes, we had a healthy sales pipeline.
Again, I lived through some of these changes with the RHX team. At Alfresco we were surprised early on to see some very big customers (and deals) come through the RHX channel. Surprised, but we weren't complaining. :-)
It will be interesting to see how RHX changes under Jim Whitehurst's management. Matthew Szulik was a fan and founder. It's not yet clear where RHX fits within Whitehurst's vision for Red Hat, but I'm hoping it will stay.
RHX (Red Hat Exchange) has not taken over the world just yet, notes Ashlee Vance of The Register. Quite fair, and quite true. Ashlee talked with people from the uber-Linux geek camp and drew some blank stares when he asked about RHX.
But this was never intended to be the audience for RHX, as Matt Mattox of Red Hat explains:
The initial focus was on North American small businesses. To our pleasant surprise, we are seeing businesses of all sizes. There's one evaluation underway, for example, for tens of thousands of users.
Alfresco has an evaluation underway that looks like the one Matt references, but it's possible that others have, too. (Zimbra, perhaps?) At any rate, we've been happy with RHX - we expected it to get traction slowly, and it has actually been better than expected. As Red Hat and its partners invest more marketing dollars into it, I suspect it will only get better.
Even The Register seems optimistic, which is saying something.... :-)
We remain bullish about Red Hat's long-term prospects with RHX. Lord knows the open source crowd could use some organization around the myriad applications that have forced their way into data centers. The project, however, does seem a bit risky for the ISVs in that Red Hat could end up owning the direct line to their customers and would dominate the main open source software marketplace.
Good points. It will be interesting to see how Red Hat answers them.
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