Red Hat says only it and Microsoft can build entire clouds
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 20:19Red Hat has come up with an interesting sales pitch that seems to benefit rival Microsoft as much as Red Hat.
At last week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat company executives repeatedly said that only two IT vendors have all the software necessary to build an entire cloud, and allow workloads to move from one cloud to another. And those two companies are Microsoft and Red Hat.
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Red Hat exec: Oracle’s not an open source company
“We and Microsoft are the only ones that can lift up that entire stack, and bring it with all our assets to the public cloud,” said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens.
To build a cloud network, the software you need includes server virtualization, an operating system, orchestration and management tools, middleware, and application development frameworks, Red Hat executives said.
One might point out that Oracle, now that it owns Sun Microsystems, meets all or most of Red Hat’s criteria for building a cloud. Open source rival Novell also offers all of the above, though Novell’s middleware comes from JBoss, which is owned by Red Hat. But Red Hat may prefer to compare itself to Microsoft rather than Oracle and Novell.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees VMware as the company’s primary competitor, but at the same time Red Hat executives claim Microsoft is its only rival that actually produces all the software necessary to build a cloud. Red Hat, of course, believes its dedication to open source should give it a leg up over Microsoft, because Red Hat customers will be able to build clouds using any combination of software vendors.
“Most companies have legacy environments they want to adapt,” says Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “That’s where the open architecture becomes really important. If they’ve already made an investment in OpenView, or Tivoli, and Windows or .NET, or whatever, you need to be able to accommodate that. You absolutely need an open architecture, which Microsoft doesn’t have, and VMware certainly doesn’t have.”
Microsoft, besides its mammoth market share, has at least one clear advantage over Red Hat. In addition to Windows, Hyper-V virtualization, .Net, and other software tools, Microsoft has its own public cloud computing service in Windows Azure.
