Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking has declared it will drop Red Hat for its underwhelming Linux support service and switch to Oracle instead.
The equity financing company's announcement comes on the back of Oracle's declaration in the US Wednesday that it will offer full-scale support for Red Hat Linux. Opes has used Red Hat for its support services since adopting the platform 18 months ago.
A firm of about 50 staff, Opes manages AU$1 billion in Australian assets. Its systems interface to 2,300 retail customers and intermediaries. The stockbroker runs two 10g databases, two Oracle application servers and Oracle's SOA Suite as a key system.
Opes executive director, Anthony Blumberg, told ZDNet Australia that Oracle's announcement was great for the company due to less than ideal support from Red Hat.
"This is where it's brilliant.... Oracle are offering two thirds of the complete solution. They're offering us the platform support, the system support, the only thing they're not really supplying us is the hardware," he said.
"So I guess from our point of view we're going to, hopefully, pay less and achieve more by having one counterpart work with us."
Opes would switch from Red Hat's support services to Oracle's within six months, he said.
"I think we're up for review fairly soon anyway and we've already been making noises about [Red Hat's support] being a little bit less than we'd anticipated, so I think we'd do that."
In his earlier announcement of full-scale support for Red Hat, Oracle chief executive officer, Larry Ellison, said fixes for bugs would be made available to the whole Linux community. As well, the new support services would be available to organisations that don't run Oracle software.
Steven Deare travelled to Oracle OpenWorld as a guest of Oracle.
How would the Linux zealots react if Microsoft released a Linux port so that it could gain new market share for it's server line like SQL Server, Exchange Server, etc. ? They would be well within the terms of the GNU public license to do so, providing they included the source code to any GNU software they used.