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Pre-show coverage Gartner Symposium Sydney 2003  ZDNet Australia |
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Red Hat, a company which has for years battled naysayers for its role in packaging and "transforming" free code for a fee, had posted solid quarterly earnings of US$3.3 million in net income on revenue growth of 36 percent (US$28.8 million).
Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL had finally come of age with its latest release, the company insisted. The new, more stable version would improve access to databases and perform better with Java -- key plus-points with corporate users and made possible through a new threading system called Native Posix Threading Library (NPTL).
Corporate customers will be pleased to note that RHEL 3.0 will go beyond x86 PCs to include support for IBM's zSeries mainframes and computers running on Intel's Itanium processor and AMD's Opteron chip.
At the event, Gus Robertson, the company's Asia-Pacific vice president, proudly proclaimed that Linux was beginning to be recognised as a "safe" choice. Did he mean it was previously too perilous for corporate Australia?
Robertson said there's been a huge increase in customer and partner interest in Linux-based enterprise solutions, an observation backed by Matthew Boon, a Gartner Asia-Pacific vice president.
"There's definitely a high level of interest in Linux and companies are evaluating how it can fit into their IT infrastructures," Boon said.
But the analyst cautioned that it's not a bed of roses -- Red Hat still has a long way to go and one area of concern is after-sales service.
"Red Hat is improving, although it's still not on par with HP, IBM and Sun at a service and support level ... customers are still nervous so they look to hardware vendors to provide support," Boon said in an interview.
I believe Red Hat's biggest obstacle is not technology. Rather, it's the battle of brand recall and perception. Unless these hurdles are overcome, Red Hat will remain on the periphery of IT departments and continue playing second fiddle to the big boys. Perhaps it should borrow a page from the gurus of tech marketing -- Microsoft?
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Lack of upgrade path to RHEL is a problem.
I'm running several RedHat 7.x servers in a production environment and I want to migrate them to the new RHEL product.
I'm happy to pay the cost, but Redhat has no upgrade path. There are simply pulling the plug on the RH 7.x,8 & 9 and expecting customers to completely re-install their production servers from scratch or lose out on security and errata patches.
This is NOT good enough and it is NOT a good way to treat customers!