One of the interesting dynamics in the open-source world is the constant back and forth with Microsoft. Sometimes they're disparaging, and sometimes they're embracing. How's the current state of affairs with Redmond right now?
Whitehurst: The good news is I'm the new guy, so there's no personal baggage there. Clearly they're our single largest competitor, so we battle on a lot of things and have a lot of different opinions of things.
Have you seen any benefits from their interoperability announcements that came out of antitrust actions?
Whitehurst: My understanding is most of it is still vaporware. It's things they will do. Some of the interoperability things — they said they'd promise not to enforce [intellectual property rights] or you can use these APIs [application programming interface] as long as you're not selling. They're trying to relegate open source to a very narrow hobbyist niche. That's a bit problematic. But that said, we welcome a little regulatory oversight there and also welcome good hard competition.
Well, speaking of competition, how about Canonical. They're funding Ubuntu development aggressively. Do you see them in customer bids?
Whitehurst: I haven't heard of them in any customer bid. There are a couple issues there. They're primarily a desktop provider. We're primarily a server provider. Those are pretty different skill sets. I welcome Ubuntu everywhere. Let them get desktops all over the place. I think that's good for Linux and good for the ecosystem. It's just they have a single set of bits. They don't have a dual model with community and enterprise bits. I don't see how anybody's going feel real comfortable, without the certifications and support and enterprise nature of those bits, feeling comfortable running those in a mission-critical environment.
I talk to them every now and again, and certification is more on their to-do list than on their done list.
Whitehurst: It's the hard stuff. It's not real sexy stuff.
I draw a clear distinction between where we create value and where we extract value. You can't get too enamored with one or the other. The airline industry creates a ton of value, but it's never figured out how to extract any of it for itself. It's great for society, but never captured any money for itself. With our model, we create value by working with the community to develop really good software. We extract value by making open-source consumable by the enterprise.
Open source is iterative innovation — thousands of small projects going on out in the community. Iterative innovation is what makes open-source so powerful, and it is a disaster if you're running a data center. Every two years, we set aside the major bits, test them, performance-tune them for the major applications, etc. Making it consumable is where we're able to extract value.
The airline industry is charging for checked bags now. Does this feel like sunny optimism compared to your last job?
Whitehurst: Yeah. When you had an operational mistake you killed people. When you had a misstep you could literally liquidate the company. This seems a little simpler. Obviously we have our challenges, but let's just say I'll take a good business model over a bad business model any day of the week. We figure out how we add value in a differentiated way and extract it in a defensible way.
One question on extension is on getting subscription revenue beyond the operating system: How's that working, for example with JBoss [Java server software]?
Whitehurst: We have said that JBoss is growing twice as fast or more than our core software was in the first quarter, and we're targeting that for the entire year. It's looking good. We just announced our SOA Suite. It far exceeded our expectations.
This is where we stick to our knitting. Open-source, with our model, works best where certification, support, mission-critical [reliability] matter. That's where middleware matters, because it has similar sets of characteristics [to operating systems]. Virtualization is another one. Those are the areas you'll see us focused on. It's where we can add value and make money.
So will you be sticking with the Red Hat Exchange for your attempt to monetize higher-level software?
Whitehurst: Yes. I want to be clear. On the exchange, I'm frankly not a big fan. We really have de-emphasized the actual exchange. The actual Red Hat Exchange program is extremely important because I do think we add a lot of value [at lower levels], but as customers want more solutions, we need to be working to ensure we have certified stack solutions — either appliances or certified stacks. So our RHX partnerships are extremely important there.
So that has evolved into a standard partner certification play, and maybe some cross-selling agreements?
Whitehurst: Yeah. What we found is a lot of people shopped on the exchange then went directly to the vendor to buy, which makes sense. So we've turned it more into a catalog. What we're working on hard is the appliances and certified stacks to make the stuff more consumable.
Red Hat has often been an advocate of open-source software, pushing the philosophical envelope, not just the business envelope. You're from the business mold, not the open-source advocacy mold. How do you see Red Hat's role now in leading the charge and waving the flag?
Whitehurst: I joined because I believe in the mission. I've been a Fedora user for years at home. Economically, it is a fundamentally better way to develop software. One thing I love about the company is it's a great confluence: when we do well as a company, we do good for the communities of use and societies around us. The last thing that wasn't open-source was Red Hat Network, and we just open-sourced it. We're all in. We are and should be leaders in open source, and that's the right decision for our shareholders as well.
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I work at a university in Redhat's Asia Pacific region where we have about 15000 redhat licenses - i.e. a support contract for 15,000 redhat installs.
We don;t acvtually use all of those licenses in fact we use less than 1000 of them and I am only personally concnered with 2-300 server systems.
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We also have a number of Sun licenses and support agreements.
We have top tier Redhat support and medium tier Sun support.
Unfortunately I get better support for non-production systems from middle of the road sun support than I get for production servers on Redfhat's top of the line package.
I have had redhat support staff suggest that I google for answers.
Hello, that's why we have support - so we don;' have to google - or so that after we have done your googling and not got anything useful back, we can get help form people who are supposedly familiar with the product and code base.
I don;t need someone to tell me to try this and see if it helps.
I need someone to tell me that they have reproduced the problem and this is the fix.
In addition I have been given advice which if followed would have broken my production servers - as I had already googled for and tried that fix on dev servers.
For the most part now I only raise tickets with Redhat now as due diligence, i.e. so I can say yes I raised it with the vendor and cover my **** I don't really expect a useful reply anymore.
Dear Mr Redhat CEO - you are not adding value.
You are fundamentally a support company and your support sucks.
I've been using Redhat now since 4.2 or so and it is my favorite distro ,/OS - I'd love to be able to recommend people buy Redhat support, but it is as far as I am concerned simply not worth the money - and we get it cheap.
I do recommend Redhat to people because of the long support cycle, i.e. security patches for 7 years - but you can get that with whitelabel and centos.
I'm happy to speak to Redhat managers if they want specific details - because I'd really like them to improve as I really like Redhat and would like to be able to recommend them in good conscience - which I can't now. Please feel free to provide my email address to Redhat management if they want specifics. Please don;t give it to a 1st or 2nd level 'droid.