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Red Hat: Right On the Radar of Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Microsoft

We've written before about how, among large commercial open source companies, Red Hat's model of offering support and services for free software has proven to be a big winner. The company delivers quarter after quarter of outstanding earnings, and is building quite a large mountain of cash. At the upcoming Red Hat Summit, September 1st through 4th in Chicago, Cisco will be a major sponsor, and Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell will be on hand. As The Var Guy notes, "for at least a few days — at its own conference — Red Hat will be seated at the center of the server universe." Meanwhile, Microsoft isn't ignoring the company, either.

According to The Var Guy:

"As you’ll recall, Cisco’s Unified Computing System strategy, launched in early 2009, includes a server push against Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell. Red Hat is a critical partner in that effort, since more and more data centers are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

The large players in servers have no choice at this point but to cozy up to Red Hat. Microsoft can't ignore Red Hat, either, and is being vocal about that fact. Large companies such as The Gap are moving completely away from Windows to Red Hat Linux. As Matt Asay notes in this post, Microsoft's recent 10-K filing notes that "competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat," and the same filing discusses the ongoing competition that Linux represents for Microsoft.

Sure, Microsoft has always liked to tout the existence of competition to ward off antitrust issues, but it has to watch Red Hat closely these days, just as all of the major players in servers do. Cisco is very wise to pursue a relationship with Red Hat, and is sponsoring the Red Hat Summit even as the company curtails its own event spending. I also won't be surprised to see Red Hat's and Cisco's cloud computing initiatives increasingly converge over time. 

• Microsoft
• Cisco
• Dell
• linux
• Red Hat
• IBM
• hp
• Red Hat Summit

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