Red Hat Summit 2008

Red Hat Takes to the Cloud and Refocuses Virtualization Efforts

| June 23, 2008 | Application Infrastructure | Show Update

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: Very High

Event Summary

June 18, 2008 -- Red Hat announced a number of strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. In support of managed virtual installations, Red Hat announced the open sourcing of the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base and the release of Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy and Audit (IPA). Red Hat also announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise MRG V1, which offers a real-time capability as well as a high-performance, multi-platform messaging system. In addition, the company announced the beta availability of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on a series of announcements made by Red Hat at its annual Red Hat Summit, because the company open-sourced its Linux management product, adding security solutions for virtualized environments, released its application server as a service on Amazon's EC2 platform, and introduced an embedded hypervisor. These announcements, when considered as a whole, paint a clear picture of a company aggressively pursuing the next-generation open source datacenter, in which applications are built to flow seamlessly between in-house infrastructure and cloud-based services.

• Vendor Importance: High to Red Hat, as the company needed to show substantial movement in support of its Linux Automation strategy and Enterprise Acceleration initiative, which it announced earlier this year. Red Hat risks lagging behind its open source competitors on the governance front, and it is still in the midst of transitioning to a channel-driven business model. However, its recent release of a the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and the announcements made at Red Hat Summit 2008 create a solid technical foundation upon which the vendor can ensure enterprise-class performance and interoperability for open source infrastructure software.

• Market Impact: Very high on the open source middleware software and services market, because Red Hat has shown once again that it is capable of leveraging its market-leading Linux OS as a means to grow its open source middleware business. This is evident in its EC2 solution, which binds together OS and application server as a cloud resource. These announcements will also impact closed and hybrid closed/open source vendors with heavy virtualization investments. Red Hat's backing of the KVM project over XenSource, coupled with its intent to treat virtualization as a next-generation OS, will prove disruptive within the marketplace and drive further work to federate, secure, and manage heterogeneous virtualization environments.

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