Oracle Claims Early Wins in Battle With Red Hat
November 19, 2007 (Computerworld) -- SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle Corp. last week said its yearlong push to take on Red Hat Inc. in the Linux market has reaped 1,500 corporate customers for its Unbreakable Linux support program. Most of those customers — well over 1,450 — signed up for the service during the past six months, with “virtually no selling at all,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during a keynote speech at the company’s OpenWorld user conference here. “We did all of this while just building up our Linux sales team,” he said. At a price ranging from about $99 to $2,000 per year, the Unbreakable Linux program provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle’s close clone of that operating system, as well as the applications that run on them. Red Hat’s Linux business continues to far outpace Oracle’s — Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said in June that the company added “multiple thousands of customers” in its first quarter of fiscal 2008 alone. Nonetheless, user reaction at the show indicated that Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat may be vulnerable. For example, Brad Maue, CIO at Stuart Maue Co., said the Oracle support offering is “half [the price] of Red Hat. And we feel we get twice the attention.” The St. Louis-based legal auditing firm switched its Linux support from Red Hat to Oracle about a year ago, he said. Tim Heath, a senior database engineer at Yahoo Inc., said that his company turned to Oracle’s Linux support offering after some bad experiences with Red Hat. “There were some bugs in Linux” that Yahoo couldn’t get Red Hat to fix, Heath said. Yahoo, which runs Red Hat Linux on 50,000 of its 150,000 servers, now has Linux support contracts with both Oracle and Red Hat, Heath noted. “We like to pit the two against each other to see who submits fixes faster,” he said. Yahoo has found that using Oracle’s Linux support eliminates the “fingerpointing” between the applications and platform departments when a problem arises, he said. Red Hat officials downplayed Oracle’s Linux efforts. “This is not about offering better support,” said Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens. “This is about ownership of the IT stack for Mr. Ellison."