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The notion that Red Hat should follow up its entry into the middleware space with a database acquisition was a popular one back in the summer, and TPM quizzed Red Hat execs on the subject at the company’s Red Hat Summit.

The response was a definite denial. "We already have dominant providers in that market, and the space has largely been commoditized already by very established players," said Red Hat's chairman and chief executive officer, Matthew Szulik, in an interview. "We will look elsewhere for places where we can add value. We have an immense amount of work to do in the infrastructure space."

"Our notion of a stack will never parallel Microsoft's notion, or OS/400 or VMS," added Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of enterprise solutions. "It is more important to provide federated access to data in any form, and we feel that this is the most important problem for us to solve. In so doing, you don't have to choose one data source."

Yeaton explained the reality of the situation is that customers had deployed all kinds of databases already, and the real problem was that 85% of the data stored by enterprises was in an unstructured form, sitting outside of databases.

Asked about the potential for an acquisition in the database market this week during the UBS Global Communications and Technology Conference, Charlie Peters was far less dismissive. “I’m not sure we ever specifically addressed the database,” he said in response to a question about whether the company would change its mind about ruling out a database acquisition.

Now, Peters was clearly not a party to the conversations TPM had at the event in June, but Yeaton and Szulik’s statements certainly sound like the result of strategic thinking on Red Hat’s part, rather than off the cuff responses.

Maybe Peters missed that meeting. In any case, he declined to discuss any further the potential for a database acquisition, other than to point out that Red Hat already offers support for MySQL and Postgres in its Red Hat Application Stack.

“What we’ve said for quite a long time is our M&A strategy has had two different focuses – one is bolt on acquisitions that complement existing technology we have, and the other is a view to broadening out scope geographically.”

The fact that a database would be extremely complementary to Red Hat’s existing portfolio is what led to speculation about an acquisition in the first place, and now that Oracle has declared war on the company, it seems even more fitting.

One person who is convinced a Red Hat database acquisition is inevitable is Dave Dargo, CTO with open source database firm Ingres. “If they really want to compete at the stack level they need to have a database,” he told me recently. “Right now they have two-thirds of a stack, at either end.”

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