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Red Hat In Business News

Posted by Hemos on from the work-to-reverse-the-slide dept.

jferg was one of the first people to write about the coverage in today's Observer in regards to the latest business happenings at Red Hat. The article touches on the launch of RH Advanced Server, but one of the most telling statistics was "Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."

2 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Slow sales? by digitect · · Score: 4, Informative

    I spent half the article waiting for the writer to provide some facts, but by the end, there still weren't any.

    She says:

    Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux.

    Does this mean RedHat is moving all their employees to the marketing department? Does it mean everybody is told to make 9 cold calls a day? All we're given is the typical investor information, share price, projections, etc., but little information about how the business plan is working or changing.

    Frankly, the few real facts that are provided show a mixed bag, hardly worthy of the article's pessimistic title. Yet another Linux story trying to make news rather than report it.

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  2. From the mouths of CEOs by Slackrat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Being a student at NCSU, home to RedHat's new corporate offices, I had the privelege yesterday of sitting in on a presentation by Matthew Szulik, CEO of RedHat. Though his presentation was on entreprenuership in NC, the talk quickly diverged into discussions of Open Source and how in the heck they plan on making money. I took the following things away from the lecture:

    1) Szulik is a decent guy. His message of measuring entrepreneurial success in social terms instead of the quarterly shareholder statement was quite refreshing. He honestly seems to embrace the ideals of Open Source.

    2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology. Though the N&O article may suggest that 90% of their staff is in marketing, it probably suggests instead that they are simply working at making RedHat a better replacement for Unix (this takes marketing AND coders).

    3) A number of skeptical members of the audience asked how they would ever make money. There were two answers: subscriptions and services. IBM is the best example of the tremendous market value of services, however Matthew spent more time on the subscription side. Let's be honest. Your average sysadmin doesn't want to have to deal with package management and keeping a system up-to-date. The RHN is a step in the right direction for managing the herculean task... it worked for me. I paid them $60 for a priority membership and I'm most pleased with it.