Oracle yet to tip Red Hat

Oracle is yet to provide evidence Australian customers are switching to its Red Hat Linux support program despite announcing new business deals for the last quarter.

As part of its third quarter earnings report, the software giant announced a number of new Australian contracts. Financial services company Skandia and Ipswich City Council have purchased Oracle Fusion Middleware, Yarra Valley Water signed up for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, and MTU Detroit Diesel purchased the Oracle Database.

However, the vendor's support for Red Hat Linux, which CEO Larry Ellison announced at Oracle OpenWorld last year, was barely mentioned.

"There has been uptake, but it's still early days as it's a new program," Oracle Asia Pacific senior vice president Brian Mitchell said during a conference call.

Hundreds of customers were using Oracle's Red Hat support, but those in the Asia Pacific region would not be named at the moment, said Mitchell.

Despite this, Melbourne-based Opes Prime Stockbroking confirmed to ZDNet Australia today it followed through on its Oracle Linux support plans and also adopted the Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution around December.

Oracle would be "more public" about its efforts in the region in a few months, Mitchell said.

In the US, Oracle has named a raft of Red Hat support customers, including Yahoo, restaurant chain IHOP and France Telecom subsidiary GlobeCast.

Asked whether Oracle's Linux support customers were adopting Oracle's own distribution, Oracle Enterprise Linux, or staying with Red Hat, Mitchell was coy.

"It's a bit of a combination of both. I don't have the statistics available at this time," he said. "Certainly we're covering both."