Red Hat CEO targets Oracle, Microsoft

RALEIGH, N.C. - Software maker Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst said Friday — his fourth day on the job — that he's angling for a showdown with much larger Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. over leadership in open source products.

Moving beyond defending a company as he did as an executive at Delta Air Lines Inc., Whitehurst is ready to go on the offensive as he builds Raleigh-based Red Hat.

"A lot of work at an established company like Delta is about preserving market share and defending against incumbents," said Whitehurst, who helped guide the airline out of bankruptcy before leaving in August.

"Here, we are the attacker. If you listen to all the squealing that Microsoft and Oracle do about us, clearly they're worried about us."

Microsoft has put its weight behind the open-source software platform peddled by Novell Inc.

Oracle has been even more aggressive, announcing more than a year ago that it would sell maintenance service for Red Hat's product — essentially copying the company's business and offering a lower price.

Whitehurst said anything short of success in the skirmishes with Oracle and Microsoft would endanger the open-source industry and the free flow of information — though he acknowledged that competing against those two "very large and very wealthy" rivals will be difficult.

"We are working to democratize information," Whitehurst said. "A lot of people don't see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information's accessible.

"If we don't fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties," he added. "Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free."

Unlike Microsoft, which keeps the code for its Windows operating system and its software secret, Red Hat collaborates with outsiders to develop its product and then gives away the software, allowing users to copy, distribute and modify it.

The company makes money by selling technical support services.

Red Hat's software core Linux brand operates the back room servers of many companies and government agencies around the world. The company estimates that the data center business overall is worth $100 billion, and it has only tapped a small portion of that.

Whitehurst also hopes to expand into software applications and onto desktop computers. But he wasn't sure that will happen immediately: "I just found the bathroom and coffee machine around here, so, we'll see."

A handful of analysts and observers questioned Whitehurst's appointment over more prominent tech-industry leaders. But the self-described "techie geek" said he is plenty qualified to handle the job.

He's a computer science graduate who runs Linux on his home computer and does programming in his spare time. And, he points out, Delta didn't exactly ignore high tech with a technology budget of about $400 million — about equal to Red Hat's annual revenues.

Whitehurst said he passed up offers from private equity groups and others to help turn around struggling companies. He enjoyed the work at Delta — a company he called "an institution that deserved to be saved" — but he wanted a new job he could get excited about.

"I am absolutely passionate about what we do and the importance of what we do (at Red Hat)," Whitehurst said. "By doing well, we do good."

Former Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's CEO since 1999, stepped down at the end of 2007 to deal with family health issues, he said. He will continue as chairman of the company's board of directors.

Red Hat shares were trading down 24 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $20.47 in midday trading Friday.

Author: Mike Baker @ news.yahoo.com

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Installing Oracle database with your nose

Oracle’s database has a reputation for being hard to install. This video might persuade you otherwise.

Over to you IBM and Microsoft. Can you do any better?

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On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007

The company wows its users with new products and new plans for the future.

Even amid the late-year flurry of trade shows, user conferences, and product launches, Oracle OpenWorld has grown to a monstrous size -- 43,000 attendees piled into San Francisco's Moscone Center and snarled city traffic, much to the chagrin of the locals twittering (and Twittering) about their displeasure.

Oracle President Charles Phillips' keynote made clear the theme of nostalgia that ran through this year's event, which marked the 30th anniversary of the founding of the firm that would one day become Oracle. Phillips also struck the "innovation" note early and often: "Our history of innovation is something that really speaks to the essence of what this company has become," he told the crowd, before coining a phrase to embody Oracle's company-purchasing frenzy over the last four years: "Acquired Innovation."

Phillips broke down Oracle's operations into what he called its three major businesses:

* Databases: Phillips reiterated Oracle's stranglehold on the database marketplace, noting not just that Oracle had 47 percent of the market, but that its share was more than the next two closest competitors combined.
* Middleware: Oracle's a "Leader" in more than a dozen of Gartner's Magic Quadrant assessments of various middleware components. (Notably, Phillips made no mention of Oracle's as-yet-unsuccessful attempt to acquire middleware competitor BEA Systems.)
* Applications: The next stage for Oracle is "to go beyond just ERP and CRM," Phillips said. "Now we're adding many more capabilities going beyond that...with applications specific to [industries]. That's a new change in our strategy."

Oracle's innovations go beyond the software itself, Phillips said. "We also innovate with our business model," he said. "'Innovation' is not just products, but it's also how you go to market, how you bring more capabilities to the customer. Given where we are at this point in history in our industry, acquisitions make a lot more sense." Phillips took special note of the 41 acquisitions Oracle has made in the last 45 months: "Companies are a lot more proven [and have] a lot more customers, the products are seasoned -- and they're actually cheaper [in the post-dot-com-bust era]. So we decided to start bringing innovation to market, supplementing our internal development -- which is about $2 billion a year -- with acquired research and development," he said.

"Given who we are, and our size, and this well-known strategy now that includes acquisitions, anyone remotely thinking about selling their company is going to come to us with their enterprise software business. Given the state of the financial markets and the traditional IPO market, we've become the IPO market for the enterprise software industry."

Oracle, though, remains a discerning shopper when it comes to doing deals, Phillips said: "For every one we do, there's another hundred that we don't do." His address coincided almost in real time with IBM's announced acquisition of business intelligence (BI) vendor Cognos, effectively closing out the wave of top-tier BI consolidation that began in early 2007 with Oracle's deal for Hyperion Solutions.

Other big-ticket items launched or introduced at OpenWorld included Oracle Application Integration Architecture 2.0; Fusion Middleware (which Phillips characterized as "being in beta now"); Enterprise Manager 11g (another beta-stage element); My Oracle Support; Oracle VM (a tool targeting the much-buzzed-about trend toward virtualization); and the unveiling of the first three Fusion Applications -- all three of which (Sales Prospector, Sales References, Sales Tools) are for the sales force, and are loaded with Web 2.0 technology.

While many of these announcements sparked a buzz on the floor, James Kobielus, principal analyst for data management at Current Analysis, says he's unmoved. "Oracle primarily offered a grab bag of incremental announcements related to strategies and product releases that had already [been] pre-announced earlier in the year," he said, in a written note.

Author: Joshua Weinberger @ www.destinationcrm.com

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