Red Hat CEO talks virtualisation, Linux and the cloud

• Tags:
• Virtualisation,
• Kernel,
• Mission,
• Cnet News

Alex Serpo ZDNet Australia

Published: 20 Oct 2008 15:17 BST

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…the only two players who can already offer a broad full suite around virtualisation and the management tools, and the benefits in the operating system, security, and so on.

How do you strike the balance between profits and the community?
It's not a balance. Open source is obviously a very powerful development model. Why are we the only profitable, public open-source company?

I think the simple reason is that too many companies try to build a business model around selling free software. Frankly that doesn't work. Selling free is difficult.

We have built a business model that works on top of the cause of open source. What I mean by that is: in open source the code is free and freely available and copy-able. So it's not about the functionality, we don't provide the functionality to our customers: we provide enterprise-class software.

We take open source, and the phenomenal software that is developed in open source, and we make it consumable for the enterprise. We freeze the spec, we support it for seven years, we performance-tune it, we put it through batteries of tests, we certify hardware and software against it, we do localisation and documentation, we do service-level agreements, and finally package that with support.

Then there is the whole loop of working with customers to get stuff [into the Linux kernel] upstream. We also offer a software assurance programme for our users. All of those things — we make it enterprise-ready and consumable for the enterprise.

Because we have a model that is built around open source, we don't run into conflicts. Somebody is going to use something that is free. Take a prime example, CentOS, probably the closest derivative of RHEL. Even that community, if you go to their website, they will say if you are running a mission-critical application, go buy RHEL. It's not the same bits, and if you need the certification and support, you buy from Red Hat.

The more people using Linux, the more people part of the community, the better. If you run into conflicts, you don't get the model. I think that's why so few other companies have been able to succeed in open source. Because they are trying to sell software. When the software is free, it's really hard to sell.

Since we're right in the thick of it, tell me your thoughts on the financial crisis — what it means for tech, and for open source?
In the 21st century, capital investment for most western companies is IT. So the bad news is when things get tight, people stop investing as much in the future. I would expect to see a slowdown in spending for new functionality. That's the bad news.

Last week I met with a couple of CIOs who I probably would not have been able to meet with before this crisis, who both said: "We use no open source, we are a Microsoft shop at the operating-system level, we have our Java app server in place, but we're getting pressure now to reduce costs. We have to take costs out of our infrastructure. We need you to help put together an open-source strategy to reduce costs, now."

We see customers who are interested in replacing [Oracle's] WebLogic with JBoss, who are looking to stop server sprawl by moving more onto z Series mainframes on logical Red Hat partitions. Obviously, the big question for us is: "[With] the net of fewer projects and the expansion of open-source use in infrastructure, where does that leave us?" That's the big question that none of us know.

But what I do know is that relatively open source will be in much better shape coming out of [the financial crisis] than going into it, relative to our propriety competitors. I certainly think…

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