Oracle to Offer RedHat Support?

rs232 writes to tell us ITP is reporting that Oracle's Larry Ellison recently called Red Hat's ability to honor their support contracts effectively into question. Taking that claim one step further, Ellison claims that Oracle will soon start offering support for Red Hat Linux users. From the article: "The reason for this move, which Oracle executives later declined to provide any real detail on, is that Red Hat isn't doing a good enough job of providing that support itself, Ellison said. 'Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers],' he said."

I wonder... Orcale distro on the way?

[Arimus]

Given the effort required to be able to offer support on a third party distro I wonder if over time Oracle will come to the conclusion they can provide their own distro as easily as carry out support for distro over which they have no/limited control.

Either that or will Oracle end up buying RH?

Small potatoes

[ivoras]

Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers]

What does this say about the largest and most successful Linux vendor out there? Only that in big business it's still a small fish.

Re:Good!

[mccalli]

If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support...

...then Red Hat would ramp up its support staff pretty much overnight, or start subcontracting quickly to someone else. Someone like, oooh, IBM Global Services [ibm.com] to take a not-so-random example.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Way to.....

[mod_critical]

Hijack? This is free enterprise!

In fact, in the open source world, this is where competition is probably going to go. Since the products are developed by the community, and some markets are flooded with options for product choice (media players, GUI dekstops, etc), the next real way to compete is going to be offering support for OSS products that someone _else_ is already offering support for.

It's not a hijack, its a competing service! Granted this situation is like a wal-mart moving into town, but it's still capitalism.

Re:Good!

[Burz]

No, Red Hat seems more concerned with shoehornng everybody into their distro. So your point is well-taken.

After all, who would WANT to support an "operating system" that may contain a near-infinite number of pieces depending on who you ask?

This is a nasty Linux problem, not just a Red Hat issue: Lacking a clear and working definition of where the OS ends and where the 3rd-party stuff begins makes "Linux" much less supportable as a product.

Re:Small potatoes

[ivoras]

Sorry, didn't know there's an "IBM Linux" :P

Quote from IBM's site:

Commercial distributions
Commercial distributions of Linux are available from IBM Linux Distribution Partners Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux.

Will the future of commercial Linux (i.e. the only one that counts) be that everyone has to support Linux in-house? Looking at the state of things today: more and more big corporations need to offer support for Linux themselves, instead of relying on what are supposed to be "Linux vendors". I'm not sure is this a good or bad thing, but it could lead to cutting out the middle man (e.g. RedHat) out of the loop and out of the market (thus costing geeks jobs, leading to more fragmentation, etc. etc.).

It's different than with other commercial systems for sure: nobody expects they'd have to provide their own support for MS Windows or Solaris - it's supposed to "just work" and if something brakes, call Microsoft or Sun to fix it.

One other thing: it could lead to a situation where there's a "Linux for everything" - in the sense that, if you want the best for your Oracle database, use this distribution, if you need it for SAP, use that one, etc. It's hard to predict how it will end, but it doesn't seem good.

You get what you pay for

[pcguru19]

Redhate Enterprise support is aggressivly priced compared to other players in the enterprise (IBM(AIX), HP(HP-UX), Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). Staffing at most of these vendors can be split into sales, support, programming, r&d, and management. Redhat's income stream will dictate how fast they can grow and how many people they employ.

The danger is to grow faster than your organization can absorb (so you don't have former janitors as VPs of development). If you do, quality and customer satisfaction will suffer. Some great examples are Leading Edge(anyone remember these guys?), Gateway 2000(who knew signing 900 retail leases within a couple of years could kill you? :) ), and Dell(who's been able to overcome this of late).

So here's where it becomes interesting. You're potentially underfunded by your licensing model and you're seeing growth in the folks buying your service. Do you cut costs(layoff), finance expansion (go in debt to grow), or raise prices? These situations are when the CEO & CFO actually earn their paycheck. I'll be interested to see how Redhat responds.

Re:I have to agree...

[mhazen]

Keeping a server running isn't difficult, it's the amount of time it takes to keep them ALL going that gets to be a bother.

The nature of my work (as is the case with most of us, I'd guess) is that there are always new services and systems needing to be built (or rebuilt, as they age) while existing services rarely get mothballed, and so even a modicum of building packages easily snowballs over time into an all-consuming task. The less time I have to spend looking backwards, the more I can keep us moving forward.

It boils down to time. If maintaining that single mail system was my only job, I'd be on easy street, but at best that systems encompasses but a sliver of my job responsibilities. I prefer to avoid spending hours each week building and pushing custom packages to servers, if I can implement a solution which is more hands-off.

The big selling point of enterprise systems for large organizations is the centralized management and administration tools, which often become useless when you aren't using prebuilt packages from the vendor.

The other problem here is that every environment is different, and the environment a server works in can significantly change the requirements, as well as the time investment, for installing and maintaining.

While I'm very experienced with Linux and very at-ease in most *nix environments, I'm not a one-person shop, and while I can build and maintain complex, custom systems doesn't mean the guy who's running that server six months from now has my skill set. Part of being a good administrator is making the job easy for whoever gets called to fix a server when you're on vacation, or after you leave.

Regards-

Sorry, but this is true

[br00tus]

I work as a UNIX sysadmin at a Fortune 1000 company. Our UNIX environment is Red Hat and Solaris. About a year ago, the idea came about to phase out Solaris, which by that time was only running Oracle, so we began beta-testing Oracle on Red Hat, and had it to the point where we had it in production for a little while. It was disastrous - we actually had to take our production database out of production and switch it to a Solaris box. This has really soured us on the idea of Oracle on Red Hat, and even if there were improvements in the last year, this would still weigh on our minds.

I saw the tag "fud" for this article. Sorry, but this is not fud, it is the truth. You can give those standard Linux zealot lines about how if we had given more resources to it, had more, smarter sysadmins with better experience and so on and so forth that it would work. But the managers do not want to hear that, they are running a business, they are not in the Linux evangelism business. The reason they liked the idea of a switch is Red Hat on Intel is generally cheaper than Solaris on Sun boxes, and it would allow us to standardize on one UNIX platform. But there were just too many problems.

I am a Linux zealot myself, at home I have a Debian with no non-free software, not even non-free Java. But business does not think about that. The Linux kernel core team (Torvalds, Morton etc.) seem to have the strategy of competing for the high-end market with Microsoft and Sun (and some IBM lines, although IBM stands to benefit from Linux in other of its product lines). This seems like a good strategy to me since the high-end market seems up-for-grabs nowadays. Business feeling comfortable with Oracle running on a business-friendly distribution like Red Hat is essential. There are plenty of SQL Server databases running on Windows in production in Fortune 500 companies, how many Oracle on Red Hat's are there? This is essential. The worst-case scenario is it is still not there yet, Sun collapses, and Microsoft swallows up the market.

I am not just all talk - my home desktop is Debian with no non-free software. I evangelize Linux at work. I sent checks to the Free Software Foundation. I write GPL software. But this is not fud, this is reality that must be faced, and business feeling comfortable with Oracle on Red Hat is a must. Someone commented that Oracle support sucks and will they do better than Red Hat? Well, I don't know one way or the other as our DBA is who calls Oracle all the time. But this is important for Oracle, and Red Hat, and Linux and the whole free software community to get right.

Re:Well could be worse for red hat

[cloudmaster]

The only reason RedHat sells anything to "corporate" America is because they *offer* support. It's not because anyone actually uses it. The people making decisions at large companies (such as the Fortune 25 company I work for now, or the Fortune 50 semiconductor company I worked for before) want another company that says they'll support the product. Perhaps even one that will have meetings with them. They don't care if the support is ever actually used, and the admins actually working with the software know that nearly anything they try to *do* with the software will invalidate the support, but no one cares. It's just that empty promise and a big ad in a trade magazine. Somehow I doubt that Oracle will make things any better, except for supporting a couple more specific configurations/situations that probably no one will actually find themselves in. :)

Re:Oracle thinks Redhat Support is poor?

[Anonymous Coward]

The entire IT industry (along with many others) watches the results of the JD Power surveys. You might be too low-level of a grunt to know this though, so I'll let it slide with this single taunt.

I'll throw in a lesson on humor antipatterns. "Larry, is that you?" and "Bill, is that you" were never funny. Appending that line to a post is just a waste of bandwidth.

You need to RTFA

[poofyhairguy82]

Red Hat has wasted enourmous amounts of money on the kernel if any johnny-come-lately can best their support offerings and contribute nothing? What's the incentive to give away your code now?

Go RTFA. It doesn't say "Oracle will support Fedora" or "Oracle will support CentOS." It says "Oracle will support Redhat." As in the Redhat OS that you have to pay to get a copy of. It seems even Ellison doesn't get it either. To quote the article:

"We can just take Red Hat's intellectual property and make it ours, they just don't have it."

Um.....no you can't Larry. Redhat owns its name. It owns its logos. It uses these to maintain its control over their OS. You can't just take Redhat and stick it in a box and sell it as your own. Redhat will sue you into the ground for using their trademarks without permission. Then suddenly Redhat's money would come from litigation- much of the market uses that as a business model.

With this move Ellison is making Redhat's name (which he does not control) more valuable. That means more money for Redhat in the long run. One again he is trying to rule the world but ends up shooting himself in the foot. OSS is fine, Oracle's leader's grasp of trademark is not....