* IBM and Red Hat join to entice Unix users to Linux
Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, they say. And with that in mind, IBM and Red Hat recently began a campaign to entice users of competing Unix systems, such as Sun Solaris and HP-UX, to switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Intel servers. The Big Blue-and-red team is offering up free consultations to users of Solaris or HP-UX on how to migrate to an Intel/Linux platform based on Red Hat software and IBM hardware. So far, the two firms have consulted with more than 500 Unix shops, according to IBM, and their goal is to reach more than twice as many enterprise customers by year-end, the vendors say. Interestingly enough, the consultations involve IBM’s AIX team.
Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, they say. And with that in mind, IBM and Red Hat recently began a campaign to entice users of competing Unix systems, such as Sun Solaris and HP-UX, to switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Intel servers.
The Big Blue-and-red team is offering up free consultations to users of Solaris or HP-UX on how to migrate to an Intel/Linux platform based on Red Hat software and IBM hardware. So far, the two firms have consulted with more than 500 Unix shops, according to IBM, and their goal is to reach more than twice as many enterprise customers by year-end, the vendors say. Interestingly enough, the consultations involve IBM’s AIX team.
In addition to the free consultations, the two vendors are also planning a road show of free seminars and educational offerings for enterprise Unix users over the next several months.
Red Hat and IBM have had a good relationship for some time. Red Hat runs on all of IBM’s server lines, from IBM’s xSeries Intel servers to the high-powered pSeries based on Power/RISC architecture, and the zSeries mainframe. (IBM supports SuSE on these platforms too.) Also, Red Hat has worked with IBM’s open source development arm to make Linux more enterprise-ready over the years. (Lawyers from the SCO Group might say the two worked a little too close, but that’s another story.)
One of the main battlegrounds of this public relations/consulting push will be Wall Street, where Sun has lately made its own appeal to users to stick with Solaris – a long-used platform in the top financial firms’ data centers.http://www.networkworld.com/news/2004/092704sunnews.html).
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This is due to a recent spate of large Wall Street names moving to Linux (CSFB, Merrill Lynch among them). IBM’s presence on Wall Street is helping its Linux push, and the promise of lower-cost, higher-performing software from vendors such as Red Hat and SuSE are enticing more financial services firms to consider a switch. In the capital of capitalism, expect the winner to be the vendor offering the fastest, most powerful and cost-effective platform.
