Red Hat gets into the fast lane

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 03 April 2008 20:38

Opinion and Analysis

McLaren sees good things ahead: "This quarter has been a solid one and I think it's just a start. It's a nice staircase going up."

The challenge now, he says, is to do things in a controlled manner - no over-exuberance, no exaggerated pronouncements, just progress in a calm, orderly manner.

There are lots of good portents for Red Hat - it holds around 80 percent of the paid-for GNU/Linux market and it's not just code that it sells, there's service-level support that appears to be convincing more and more people to come on board.

There are indications too that in a worsening business climate, people are more inclined towards open source solutions.

McLaren doesn't want to provide figures on the conversion rates of Unix to Red Hat and Windows to Red Hat - though he laughs when I tell him that it is stretching things to think that the company does not maintain such statistics. "I don't have the figures at my fingertips," he says.

What of the plans for the Global Desktop? Well, that project seems to be getting delayed. And delayed. It's overdue by more than six months after having been initially announced in May last year. Last August, the company said that the release would be delayed, reportedly because it was taking time to work out deals for the provision of certain multimedia codecs.

The Global Desktop is said to be aimed at developing countries but when it will emerge is anybody's guess. All that McLaren can say is that it's getting delayed.

"The desktop is one small part (of our operations)," he says. "The server is the place where most of opportunities lie."

McLaren is positive about Sun's acquisition of MySQL. "It's another kick (up) for open source and we applaud it," he said. "There's a lot to eat at the open source table" and the more companies which queue up to get a bite, the better.