The best IT vendor of all? Red Hat

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Nov. 27, 2007

For the fifth year, CIO Insight polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. This year's winner? The No. 1 vendor? None other than Linux distributor Red Hat.

Perhaps even more impressive than Red Hat beating such name brand companies as Google and Hewlett-Packard was that Red Hat also earned a remarkable 97 percent loyalty rating. In other words, 97 percent of Red Hat's customers plan on continuing to do business with Red Hat in the future. Oracle, which is doing its best to snatch Red Hat's business away from it with its Oracle Unbreakable Linux, should keep well in mind.

How does Red Hat win the hearts and minds of its corporate customers? A close look at how IT executives evaluated Red Hat and the other vendors shows us that where Red Hat really stood out above the rest was in how its products met expectations for lowering costs and meeting commitments on time and on budget.

There have been endless debates over Linux vs. Windows TCO (total cost of ownership). Some studies have claimed to be objective, but are based on Microsoft partners' reporting. Other studies have found that cost really isn't that big of an issue in operating system decisions. This may come as quite a surprise to CIOs and CFOs filing IT budgets for 2008.

What the CIO Insight study found was that cost is important to businesses and that Red Hat, by a good margin, is considered to give the most bang for the least amount of bucks. In other categories, Red Hat also ranked high. When it came to meeting expectations for increasing revenues, Red Hat ranked third behind VeriSign and Google. As for ROI (Return on Investment), Red Hat came in fifth behind VeriSign, Google, Dell and Research in Motion. It was only in the category of "solving the business problem paid to solve" that Red Hat wasn't in the top five. That said, it still ranked higher in this category than any other operating system vendor.

In the overall operating system vendor race, if you count companies that are not primarily operating system businesses, the rest of the pack was 17) IBM (AIX, OS/400, z/OS); 18) Sun (Solaris, OpenSolaris); 21) Microsoft (Windows); 26) Novell (SUSE Linux); and 29) Oracle (Unbreakable Linux, a Red Hat clone). This also shows that enterprises don't see Linux, in and of itself, as a difference maker.

It's only when Linux is combined with a strong support program and high-quality business implementations that Linux stands out among the rest. In short, Red Hat delivers not just Linux, but the top-end services and support that 21st century businesses want from their software partners.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Except where otherwise specified, the contents of this site are copyright © 1999-2008 Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis Enterprise is prohibited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.