Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Customer referrals that Microsoft licenses can't buy: Union Bank goes with Red Hat

January 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Customer referrals that Microsoft licenses can't buy: Union Bank goes with Red Hat

TAGS: Open Source

I can't point to much that I'd call "positive" to come from the Microsoft/Novell pact. It makes no sense on a range of different levels. But one thing positive has come from it, and I hope it's not an isolated incident:

Companies are starting to talk about the open source software they're using.

Today Red Hat announced that Union Bank (one of the 25 largest banks in the US) will be standardizing on Red Hat Enteprise Linux. Not installing a few SUSE servers while continuing to use and add more RHEL (which is the case with every company that has announced support for SUSE/Microsoft (but failed to mention that they're not abandoning RHEL any time soon, and that each - with the exception of Wal-Mart - was already a SUSE customer).

From the press release:

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Union Bank of California, one of the 25 largest banks in the United States, will standardize its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Company migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from AIX to realize significant performance gains as well as centralized, secure management through Red Hat Network. Union Bank is also piloting JBoss as well as MySQL and plans to make Red Hat's complete solution stack part of its core technology direction....

The criteria for Union Bank’s platform selection included cost, reliability, scalability, security, provisioning, configuration management, the available talent pool and what the it believed to be the future direction of the software space. Red Hat was able to meet all of the requirements, and in just nine months UBOC built solutions running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite and MySQL.

It's awesome to see this kind of public support for open source. Virtually 100% of the Fortune 500 are running Linux, and 81% (or more) are deploying open source applications (according to CIO Insight and a range of other studies). Yet few will talk about it. That's too bad, but hopefully getting better.

As for Novell SUSE, I want at least one announcement on SUSE adoption that isn't brokered by Microsoft. I know from my time working there that Novell has been successful in getting big deals with some marquee customers. But we don't hear anything about those. I will be ecstatic to post them here and talk up SUSE, but not if Novell has to rely on a dubious patent pact and Microsoft's COO to make the sale.

Posted by Matt Asay on January 29, 2007 11:17 AM

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