Wall_St_Geek

Novell vs. Red Hat: The Battle for Software Partners

Red Hat seems to struggle on how to deal with partners. My own experiences have direct relevence. My firm provides solutions to large organizations in emerging economies - where Red Hat claims to have a large part of their strategy focused. I was clearly able to articulate what I needed from Red Hat as a partner, and they were completely unable to get organized around it. While I'm a Red Hat shareholder, and have followed them closely since 1999, I think they have reached the size where they are losing touch with their partner base.

Red Hat Needs to Get Red Hot to Achieve Goals

It does seem a fairly unachievable goal to set. Red Hat has been in this space since the mid 90's (I briefly competed against them for a time), and I still don't feel they have made much progress, despite having good product offerings.

Frankly, I would be surpised if they came close to 15-20% of the market. However, they do have 1 thing in their favor. The tech industry continues to push towards SOA and SaaS, and these natually increase the demands for what RHT is defining as middleware. With continued consolidation in the industry (e.g. Oracle buying BEA) and fairly high prices, RHT may just start to gain ground as the affordable alternative for smaller enterprises. I am long RHT, but haven't seen much to excite me recently.