| What to make of Oracle vs. Red Hat? |
Oct. 26, 2006
The tremors from Oracle's recent decision to support its own version of Red Hat Linux less expensively than Red Hat does are still being felt in the Linux community.
Red Hat's official statement is that, "The opportunity for open source just got bigger. Oracle's announcement further validates Red Hat's technical leadership. We will continue to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle and compete on value and innovation."
On Red Hat's site, though, the Linux company comes out swinging. In a section entitled, Unfakeable Linux points out a laundry list of what's wrong with Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. This includes no support for the Red Hat Application Stack; no guarantees of hardware or software compatibility; and, invoking that swear-word of Linux circles: Oracle will "fork" the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) code.
Does Red Hat have reason to take this so seriously? After seeing its stock get slammed by almost 24 percent in the first full day since Oracle's announcement, it's easy to see why they're already making a fight out of it.
On the other hand, Kevin Carmony, Linspire Inc.'s CEO thinks the market is over-reacting to Oracle's move. After all, Carmony said, "Since when has Oracle been interested in saving IT departments' money? Since when has Oracle been known for offering quality support? This news is a bit like Hershey's saying they are going into the health food business. Buyer beware."
Carmony then backed up his claims with some facts. "For the last two years, Red Hat has topped the CIO Insight [vendor value] Survey," he said. "Where is Oracle? This year they were at #39! This is even worse than Microsoft at #31. Oracle's 39th spot is down from their previously sad showings at #28 and #30, for the prior two years. You'd think for the kind of money Oracle charges, they'd be at least in the top ten. Just think what kind of support you'll get with this loss leader pricing. Oracle was, however, ranked high on one of the charts, coming in at #2 in 'Companies With Highest Percentage of POOR RATINGS.'"
Linspire, best known as a desktop Linux desktop, is not a Red Hat ally, but Carmony is putting his money where his mouth is. "I should disclose that I purchased Red Hat stock this morning," said Carmony.
Billy Marshall co-founder and CEO of rPath, a Linux appliance company and former VP of North American sales at Red Hat, also has his doubts about Oracle's Unbreakable Linux plans.
"We will all have to wait and see if Oracle emerges as a credible provider of a general purpose operating system. They are clearly the market leader for general purpose database technology, so they definitely have the skills to handle complex technical products. However, Oracle has not distinguished themselves in other similar general purpose infrastructure categories. In the case of application servers, Oracle mostly provides technology in support of their application deployments. How many deployments of Oracle application servers exist absent a deployment of Oracle applications," asked Marshall.
In addition, Marshall continued, "There are also many unanswered technical questions regarding how Oracle will provide Linux maintenance. Oracle claims they are going to follow the Red Hat maintenance stream, but they also claim they are going to issue patches to customers independent of Red Hat. When Oracle patches a system for a customer, and Red Hat subsequently provides a patch that conflicts with the Oracle approach, how will the conflict be resolved?"
He also sees technical problems in what Oracle is proposing to do. Marshall explained, "Red Hat systems rely on a maintenance packaging approach (the Red Hat Package Manager or rpm) that assumes a single maintenance stream from a single vendor. The naming convention for rpm combined with the approach for handling dependency metadata will make it very difficult for Oracle to insert themselves into the maintenance process in a manner that provides the best Linux technology offered by both Red Hat and Oracle separately."
Thus, Marshall thinks, "It is more likely that a customer move to the Oracle maintenance stream will be a permanent move because the resulting system will quickly become incompatible with Red Hat maintenance. Perhaps the Oracle system will be better. We will have to wait and see."
Dan Kusnetzky, former VP of IDC's System Software research and now executive VP of marketing for open-source groupware vendor Open-Xchange, thinks that Oracle is trying to "increase its overall revenues without appearing to increase the cost to its customers, it's a logical move to first support an operating system underneath Oracle's stack of software and then to offer a version of that software with its own label."
Kusnetzky believes Oracle may be able to pull off supporting Linux. "Oracle clearly has the staff already trained to support the operating system, provide documentation and training and in the end, Oracle's customers may find that they have a more integrated, better supported Oracle-based solution."
At the same time, though, "The fact that it's based upon Red Hat might be a limiting factor in organizations that have selected SUSE, Ubuntu, or some other Linux distribution. These organizations may, on the other hand, like the idea of their CRM, ERP or other Oracle solution can be treated like a software appliance," said Kusnetzky.
Kusnetzky also sees why many potential customers might find this a very attractive option. "It's my view that organizations are seeking a 'once and done' solution when and wherever possible. That is, they want to deal with an issue once and know that they're done with it (other than ongoing operational support). Integrating an operating environment, database, runtime environment and applications may make it easier to provide that 'once and done' solution. This is Microsoft's approach today, and was the approach offered by IBM, HP, DEC, and others in the past."
George Weiss, Gartner's VP of servers wasn't surprised by Oracle's move. "We were expecting threats to Red Hat's dominance, including ones form Oracle. We thought it was important to Red Hat to start addressing this before they get caught off guard."
From where Weiss sits, "Oracle's Unbreakable Linux may be a serious threat to become the data center of choice for large enterprises." That said, though, he doesn't think Oracle will be able to steamroller Red Hat.
Oracle's low "Support price really isn't the issue; it will be the value of that support. We're warning our clients to really test the Oracle support to see how well they resolve issues. And, this isn't a matter of just testing simple applications; they really push to push the envelope to see if Oracle has the prowess to deliver the services."
You should also keep in mind, Weiss said, that "Red Hat and Oracle are very different companies." Frankly when it comes to making a buying decision, "Price should be at the bottom of the list. Reliability, speed, quality are all more important."
Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata, sums up the entire situation: Oracle's not setting themselves up in direct competition with Red Hat -- in the sense of having their own general purpose distro. But they figure that they might as well provide the OS foundation for their own middleware where possible. There are the monetary aspects of course -- more money for Oracle and less for others. But it also gives them more complete control of the whole stack which could -- at least in principle -- eliminate some variables around patch levels, making support easier."
The questions remain, though. How will Red Hat respond to this challenge? And, how well will Oracle do at supporting Linux? The answers to these questions will determine how this enterprise IT conflict will resolve itself.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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