Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Red Hat Exchange: Red Hat asserts its role as the leader of the free (and open source) world

March 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Red Hat Exchange: Red Hat asserts its role as the leader of the free (and open source) world

TAGS: Open Source

It's a very good day if you work for or with Red Hat. The company continues to fire on all cylinders, announcing its Red Hat Exchange (rhx), of which Alfresco is part, as well as significant expansion to its channel strategy. (See also Steve Shankland's CNET article for more detail.)

This is the sort of leadership that has been lacking in the open source business community. I've been called a "Red Hat shill" (Pete :-), but open source has long needed someone to stand up for it unequivocally. IBM, Oracle, and others all play nice with open source up to a point: the point at which it threatens its core businesses. Red Hat is a pureplay open source vendor with no proprietary history to mop up with hybrid models and Janus-faced support for open source.

Which is why I think RHX is the right strategy by the right company.

I see rhx lowering barriers to open source adoption, making Red Hat the center of the open source ecosystem, as it should have been long ago. For Alfresco, we don't have any problem getting into the Global 2000 - we count many of the world's largest financial services, government, media, and pharmaceutical companies as customers, many of them running Alfresco company-wide.

For us, it's the SME market that we've been trying to figure out, and which RHX offers solid inroads into. For many other open source applications companies, it's the opposite (SugarCRM has always been exceptionally strong in the SME market, and is now strong in the Global 2000 market. It took a different path to market success than we did.) Either way, rhx is a great entree to the enterprise, large and small, as Steve Hamm's BusinessWeek article calls out:

The exchange may turn out to be most critical for the smaller companies riding on Red Hat's coattails. Linux has gone mainstream in corporations, but so far, most open-source programs that run on it, such as customer relationship management software, haven't seen that kind of uptake. A not-yet-released survey by Gartner of North American and Northern European information technology purchasers shows that 59% use Linux on server computers, yet only 16% are using open-source software for customer relationship management.

"Rhx is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for applications," says Paul Doscher, chief executive of JasperSoft, a small San Francisco company whose software program for business decision-makers will be sold there. "I think it will knock down the last barrier delaying companies from adopting open-source applications."

RHX serves as a one-stop shop for buying into open source applications. Frankly, it's something that VA Software should have done long ago, or IBM, or someone. While still at Novell, I argued for Novell to take that role, and it took steps in the right direction with its MarketStart program. The problem was that there wasn't enough forward momentum within the company for open source. The company constantly had to look backward to staunch the hemorrhaging of GroupWise, NetWare, etc.

Regardless, it's good to see a true open source player assuming the role of hub in the open source ecosystem. It couldn't have happened at a better time.

Posted by Matt Asay on March 14, 2007 12:23 PM

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