One of the primary reasons companies buy Red Hat and JBoss is for the network(s): Red Hat Network and JBoss Operations Network. These networks basically take a lot of the administrative overhead (and deployment risk) out of working with open source operating systems and middleware.
Could you go build, deploy, and update Red Hat Linux or JBoss middleware without them? Sure. Many do. But these network products make it easy, and "easy" is something for which lots of enterprises are happy to pay.
I talked with Rich Friedman, director of Product Management at Red Hat today (Rich was part of the JBoss acquisition), and got the low-down on the present and future of Red Hat Network/JBoss Operations Network, especially in light of Oracle's recent announcement of its own management product.
Rich had interesting things to say about the product, including its management of virtualized instances of RHEL, but you can read much of that here, as covered by InternetNews.
What really grabbed my attention, however, was Rich's casual announcement that Red Hat is going to be open sourcing both the Red Hat Network Satellite Server and the JBoss Operations Network Server.
This is big news.
It's not big because Red Hat is trying to compete with OpenView or some other broad-stroke systems management product. It's big because Red Hat could be providing the network-foundation for every open source company on the planet. As I've written before, someone is going to make serious money by enabling the rising tide of commercial open source.
With the Red Hat Network, Red Hat is apparently not trying to reinvent the wheel, or encroach on others' "wheels" (e.g., Tivoli, HP OpenView, etc.). It's simply trying to build a strong management tool for its own technology. By open sourcing it, however, Red Hat could enable an ever-growing body of commercial open source vendors to make serious money with free software. The network is the key to these models. Service, in other words, and not merely software.
As an ancillary benefit, the more companies that use this common platform to build their management systems, the broader the pool of companies that can easily integrate with Red Hat, either as a partner or as an acquisition. Customer value goes up without sacrificing code freedom.
Posted by Matt Asay on January 29, 2007 12:38 PM
