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Open Source Blog
Red Hat Enterprise JBoss on its way?
November 15, 2006
Red Hat is set to change the development model for the JBoss enterprise middleware it acquired in June, replicating the Fedora/Enterprise Linux model it uses for its Linux operating system.
Speaking at the UBS Global Communications and Technology Conference, Red Hat’s EVP and CFO, Charlie Peters, said the company is working on a plan to create a Fedora-style community development version of JBoss as well as a subscription-only RHEL-style package.
“One of the things that we’re trying to address is the development model, to come up with something similar to the RHEL/Fedora model,” he told the conference. “At the moment we’re still working on that model for JBoss, it’s not a model that they had before,” he added.
A change in the package model is part of the company’s plans to convert "almost 11 million free downloads" to subscription customers, Peters added. “We have an installed user base today that are natural customers when they get to the point of needing to have better support,” he said.
Red Hat’s share price was punished in late September after the company announced that it’s billings had taken a hit due to the training of sales staff on the JBoss stack, a change of sales structure in Asia Pacific, and a higher proportion of three-year deals billed one year at a time.
He maintained that the company is now seeing some new customer wins thanks to engagements in geographies not previously approached by JBoss and targeting CxO level executives, rather than developers.
“JBoss is an open source middleware product that has almost 11 million free downloads that have been taken across the globe, and yet today they still have a very small paid customer base,” he said.
“Our opportunity here is to use the knowledge of what we’ve done on the Linux side to create the same kind of environment on the middleware side and convince customers of the value of moving from free to paid,” he said.
“We’re beginning to see some traction there,” he added. “We’ve made the first ever sale in Asia Pac, they had no presence there before. We had our first sale in India, they had no presence there before, and we’re beginning to see traction at higher levels of the organization.”
Comments
ummm, note to Red Hat CFO Mr. Peters, I’ve downloaded Firefox at least 15 times in the last year (different computers, reinstalls, upgrades, fixes, etc). Just imagine how many times I will have downloaded Firefox in 6 years. That does not make me 15 users. Because if it does, then man could I get a lot more done in a day!
So believing that your user base is 11 million is definitely new-math (and since you’re CFO, I’d suggest you be a little careful with new-math). You could argue that there have been 11 million downloads of JBoss packages over the past nearly 6 year, but that does not equal users. Every one of your users would have downloaded at least 20-40s of times over the past nearly 6 years. And they would likely have downloaded/used other application servers at the same time.
Also, Sourceforge stats show that there have only been 8.6 million downloads for all JBoss packages on Sourceforge since JBoss packages were available on Sourceforge in 2001. So that means every single version, release and modification binary package, the associated source packages and MD5 files would be considered a separate download inside of that 8.6 million figure (aka “a customer” using new-math). I’d bet a dinner that the number of actual JBoss users is at least two orders of magnitude less than the download figure.
Anywho...more here: http://saviorodrigues.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/red-hat-cfo-using-new-math/
I've just taken a look back at my notes on this and realised he referred to "almost 11 million free downloads" rather than users. I'll edit the post accordingly.
Although the Sourceforge stats tell a different story I'm guessing there may be other places to download it from.
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