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Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
While I'm glad and all that they are so called flourishing in the recession, they are getting 194 million in revenue.
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Even if it wasn't gross income, it wouldn't be that impressive.
Also, people seeking a cheaper option in a recession?
Have we ever heard that before?
The summary made it sound like it was something extremely unique, special, and peculiar. It's not. I was bringing the point that their business model doesn't make them necessarily different than someone just selling licenses, as support is not optional, something that isn't mentioned at all in the summary.
Thank you for assuming I'm an illiterate idiot, though.
That's why they have the concept of "support levels." In most cases if you have Basic support it means you get access to their private online knowledge base and a VoIP line to an outsourced guy behind a desk on the other side of the planet.
If you're an Enterprise then you have direct access to a bunch of very smart guys who come buy your team dinner when they're in town.
Their competition won't be windows so much as oracle. Oracle will soon own solaris and mysql. Rumor I've heard is they'll be pushing 3 distros: Linux + Mysql, Linux + Oracle (express or full), and Solaris + Oracle to blanket the LAMP and DB market. Obviously, there will still be plenty of lamp stacks backed by free distros but RHAT will have have to do something to differentiate.
You're practically answering your own question. The next economic boom will be about leveraging those newfangled 'open source' technologies in order to gain unprecedented profits (because after all, that's what defines an economic boom). In the downturn after that we will both have a very good open source ecosystem and on the other hand a lot of people blaming open source because they couldn't get their profit out of it.
The only problems are going to be patents which, if not eliminated by or during the next economic boom will cause the next economic downturn. Of course then maybe patents will be overturned OR all patents will slowly start to expire causing the next boom (an open-source-like environment without having encumbering patents)
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The first step to defeating corporate personhood is convincing people to think of corporations as plural entities. Despite being British I usually write in American English, but this is a notable exception.
At least in my world, our banks and trading partners like to make sure we have outside support, in case one (or all) of us gets hit by a bus. That's only being responsible. Our best-supported (and most important) systems are RHEL systems. Then again, we are probably what you would consider a medium-to-large US company.
Unless your scope is kept very shallow and/or very focused, you will never be doing anything more than tweaking applications or simple debugging. The codebase for most apps is too large and if it's not your primary job / hobby then you won't have time to learn it, let alone keep up with its development.
It's wise for each company to know where they stand when making any IT expenditures, whether the goal is to have a large Help Desk for instance or outsource everything beyond a certain scope. I don't run cabling anymore, and although I could if needed, we pay contractors for that stuff. Just like I implement systems using MySQL, but I don't tweak its source or try to perform bugfixes myself (beyond Googling for answers to questions) because I have other things to do. I support other databases and systems, and I have other apps to code. My time is most valuable to my employer for these tasks, and I'm a lot more expensive than spending a few thousand a year per server for support.
Need an example? OK. We successfully implemented a fiber card in 2 of our blades (RHEL 5.4 with kernels from 5.1) and this week brought up a third blade (same model, same base OS) only this time using RHEL 5.4 with KVM for virtualization. The kernel is 5.4 and the HP drivers won't install. The issue appears that one of the RPM's (lpfc IIRC) won't install because 5.3 and higher is not supported. The support grid at HP says that 5.4 is supported. Now I need to implement the entire tested solution by the end of next week.
Do I want to play around with this? No. I have one of our network admins contact HP and work it out, and when they're finished, give me a written set of instructions which I will add to my documentation. That's how larger businesses handle this stuff.
Question: as I am not a Linux guy I don't know so maybe someone here can answer: which is more expensive, just buying a Windows 7 Pro license, or getting RHEL for free and paying support for 5 years? Honestly I don't have a clue, all I know is I can usually pick up a Windows pro OEM for usually around $130-150. So which is more expensive?
Personally I wish RHEL all the luck in the world, because my admin buddies swear by it. They say it is rock solid and the tools are top notch, I was just wondering which one works out to be cheaper. Does MSFT make more $$$ per unit by going upfront, or does RH by going long term?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.