While Red Hat has challenges, it's still one of the most influential vendors in Linux and open source. And last week's Red Hat Summit in San Diego showed that the company still has plenty of momentum and sway in the industry.

The third-annual event kicked off with news from IBM, which said it was teaming with Red Hat to provide greater security for mainframes — or System z — running the leading enterprise Linux distribution. IBM's System z vice president, Jim Stallings, told summit attendees that the two vendors have created a joint technical group devoted to supporting Red Hat on IBM mainframes with emphasis on system security. The two companies also announced development of security-enhanced Red Hat Linux for the Systme z; this is Red Hat's take on SE Linux technology, developed originally by the NSA, to secure and isolate applications running on a Linux system.

On the other end of the computing spectrum, Red Hat also announced its Red Hat Global Desktop initiative — a package of Red Hat desktop Linux and productivity applications, targeted a SMBs and government users. The software was co-developed with Intel, and is designed to run on low-cost PC hardware lines the hardware vendor has planned. Observers said the move is an attempt to gain back some desktop Linux mindshare it may have lost to Ubuntu, as well as Novell's most recent SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop (SLED).

Virtualization was also on Red Hat's to-do list at the summit; the company announced virtualization technology for Intel-based vPro desktops — machines with OS/hardware hooks that take care of tasks such as client security and management. Red Hat says users will be able to create virtual machines on desktops which take advantage of vPro technology, and provide IT administrators with greater control over end-user machines — even beyond the offerings of the stand-alone vPro feature set, Red Hat claims.

Red Hat also gave shindig attendees a sneak preview of its bread-and-butter offering: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; improvements in virtualization hardware support; and better support for advanced server technologies such as Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architectures.