* Can Red Hat weather the Oracle/Microsoft/Novell perfect storm
The enterprise IT market is becoming a lonely world for Red Hat.
If Red Hat wasn’t having a bad enough November – following the announcement of Oracle’s strategy to steal away Red Hat support customers – the Novell/Microsoft Linux pact may have made it worse. Oracle’s brash move is to offer support for Red Hat Linux customers and an alternate code base, which the company says will be more finely-tuned to run Oracle apps.
The Microsoft and Novell agreement will involve co-development of virtualization technology. This will allow Windows and SuSE Linux servers to operate in virtualized environments, where the two operating systems run on the same machine – hosted, at the root, by either company’s platform. A patent agreement made between the companies also guarantees they won’t sue each other’s users as a result of any mixed-code offerings they cook up.
Worse for Red Hat, Microsoft said it will now recommend Novell’s SuSE for users running mixed-system environments.
All this puts the squeeze on Red Hat. Things could get really bad for the company if large enterprise ships running Oracle flock to the database maker for support, and Microsoft/Novell come up with a real offering to make Linux/Windows environments run better than Microsoft/Red Hat environments.
Red Hat has powerful friends of its own, however. IBM and HP are key allies with the software maker, having used Linux as an effective way to counter their own waning Unix technologies, and drive hardware sales. As long as Red Hat continues to make reliable, powerful software while keeping its powerful server-making friends, expect the Linux vendor to weather the Oracle/Microsoft/Novell perfect storm.
