Red Hat CEO Whitehurst remarks to AP misunderstood - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 10, 2008
Red Hat CEO Whitehurst remarks to AP misunderstood

According to a Red Hat spokesperson, the AP business writer who recently interviewed new Red Hat (RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst misunderstood some comments about Red Hat’s intentions in the applications portion of the open source software (OSS) business. Although the AP story lead with Whitehurst’s plans to be “the attacker” against Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL), the article also said that Whitehurst hopes to expand Red Hat “into software applications…” Red Hat had previously said it would expand across the program development/infrastructure layer of the information technology stack and not up the stack into OSS applications like business intelligence, enterprise content management, ERP, CRM and so forth.

However Red Hat told me I should not read anything in the interview as a change in Red Hat strategy. That’s good because a move up the stack would put Red Hat into competition with many of its OSS partners such as Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, Compiere, SugarCRM and CentricCRM and retard the Red Hat Exchange concept further. The Exchange concept really hasn’t reached the potential of hundreds of solutions envisioned when it was announced. Only about a dozen partners are currently highlighted on the Red Hat Exchange site. To really be a factor in Red Hat’s future the Exchange has to take on the look of the Digital OEM catalog, circa 1978.

So putting the two themes together (attacking Microsoft/Oracle and not moving up the stack), to the extent Red Hat is going to attack Microsoft and Oracle, it is going to do it on Red Hat’s home field—the Unix/Linux infrastructure market. Even attacking Microsoft on those grounds is new news because previously Red Hat’s strategy has been all about migrating old-Unix-installations (e.g., HP-UX, AIX, Solaris) to Linux. To the extent Red Hat tries to start unplugging some Windows servers, things could get interesting. Attacking Oracle at the non-applications level is interesting for an entirely different set of dynamics, not the least of which is Oracle is basically delivering the same software as Red Hat on the operating system level and the same functionality as Red Hat JBoss on the middleware level. And Oracle has a very loyal installed base.

Mr. Whitehurst, Let the attacks begin!