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Wrapping up Red Hat week, I caught up with Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing & General Manager, Products Division at Red Hat, as he was catching a plane to New England from San Diego. Finding ex-DEC, DG, and Wang folks among the hot new companies from the south and SV is not unusual but finding ones who still live in good old “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire is. Tim must want to vote early in the upcoming presidential race but given his job, it will probably be by absentee ballot.

Yeaton is responsible for all Red Hat marketing functions worldwide including Partner, Product and Programs Marketing and Communications. Yeaton was most recently President and CEO of Avaki Corporation (acquired by Sybase), and worked before that at Macromedia and DEC/Compaq.

I tried to cover the Red Hat Summit week waterfront with Tim in a short timeframe but if you have any questions for Tim, send them along to me and I’ll follow-up. I was interested in:

• Speculation that broke Friday May 11 that Red Hat was interested in acquiring open source software (OSS) application companies. Zimbra and Alfresco were mentioned specifically by Credit Suisse (as quoted by Larry Dignan on SeekingAlpha). This would have been bad news for users all around and OSS devotees in particular but I didn’t hear any thing along those lines at Wednesday's Red Hat Financial Analysts conference (Tim's slides are still available at the Red Hat web site) and I heard just the opposite at Red Hat's most recent quarterly-results conference call. Red Hat Exchange (RHX) is key to providing users both choice and quality in the applications stack just as users have choice in the operating system and middleware layers. Yeaton confirmed that RHX is not about acquisition but partnering. In my opinion, Red Hat acquisition of application suppliers from its RHX "catalog" (or using the RHX program as a due-diligence method for M&A as investors were discussing) would instantly set up conflict that would retard the entire OSS market's development (and thereby limit user choice). As an ex-DEC guy, Yeaton appreciated my analogy that RHX is potentially as important to the OSS movement (and the overall IT market) as the DEC ISV catalog was in the 1970s (and that the Oracle CAI program was in the 1980s, and the Microsoft ecosystem were in the 1990s).

Of course, he was careful to imply that “you never say never.”

• The Red Hat Global Desktop strategy that was announced last week but not discussed among financial analysts. Does Red Hat really care about a Windows desktop replacement strategy or is the Unix-server migration strategy where all the Red Hat marbles get placed? I don't believe many users are considering a desktop change in the near future but understanding Red Hat's strategy might give you some food for thought five years down the road. “Yes, Red Hat wants to have a knowledge worker platform but the thick client desktop has had its day except possibly in some emerging geographic markets” where Red Hat desktop Linux is well positioned. Hence the “global desktop” nomenclature which I did not get until his explanation.

Strategically, Red Hat wants to support thin clients that are network-aware (see Red Hat’s announcement with Exadel). Owning the server (UNIX migration now; mainframe and Windows migration later) is the key to that strategic direction. I believe even Microsoft believes that the days of the thick client desktop are numbered so it would not hurt for users to start thinking that way, especially for the 80% of their employees not currently "touching the network" and the 10% touching it with much more (expensive) horesepower than needed. An X-terminal anybody?

• Red Hat Virtualization plans. Yeaton explained how the virtualization strategy and pricing are set to drive Red Hat platform pervasiveness (taking a page out of the Microsoft playbook). The RHEL platform comes with virtualization built in, in contrast to EMC/VMware and most system supplier’s approach to the technology. In my opinion, users have to be pretty sure what they are getting--vs. what they already have--as they make virtualization decisions over the next few years, lest they pay for something that they've already paid for.

In addition, Red Hat and Intel will use the same virtualization technology base that runs with RHEL servers to build the Intel Appliance OS, a next generation client.

• Red Hat Interaction with Apache.org Users, especially those responsible for integration software, should be happy tha the days of Apache-JBoss talking past each other are probably over. That’s just not the Red Hat style (and I would think Apache would tell me the same thing). Yeaton says Red Hat wants to leverage the entire OSS community the way it always has (and that includes working with Apache).

On the other hand, naturally, as Red Hat begins to “OSS” Metamatrix, it will happen through JBoss.org.

Interesting talk. Interesting guy. Red Hat is leading this parade and are working hard to keep it that way.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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