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“The UK has always been something of an open source laggard,” says open source content management firm Alfresco’s co-founder, president and CEO, John Powell. “But things are definitely changing fast, not least since the government published that policy document.”

According to Powell, the company has seen in-bound lead enquiries shoot up from around 4,000 a week to over 6,000 a week.

Alfresco, which was founded in the UK in 2005 by Powell, the former COO of Business Objects, and John Newton -- co-founder of Documentum – is a classic example of the latest breed of open source software firms. Far from being a group of hobbyists, Alfresco is run by executives with a serious pedigree at leading commercial content management and business intelligence firms. It’s backed by not one but three major investors: Mayfield Fund, SAP Ventures and Accel Partners, which was a key backer of companies like Veritas Software, Macromedia, Foundry Networks and Facebook.

John Powell, CEO of UK-based open source firm Alfresco.

But as well as the experience of its founders and investors, it is also its ambition which shows how far open source has come. Gone are the days of open source firms merely trying to outmanoeuvre their larger proprietary software rivals by offering more niche, or simply cheaper software.

Alfresco recently launched version 3.1. “The intent of Alfresco Enterprise 3.1 is to extend Alfresco’s position as the leading open source replacement for high-cost enterprise content management systems and Microsoft SharePoint,” says Powell. “In today’s economic climate, Alfresco provides a low-cost, low-risk alternative with commercial service level agreements for organizations looking to replace legacy systems or start new projects.”

3.1 is said to usher in improvements to service levels and response times, as well as to simplify administration, monitoring and deployment. It even supports the draft OASIS web services standard, CMIS (content management interoperability services).

The myth of hippy developers

Companies like Alfresco are still battling a perception in some quarters that open source is about hobbyists writing sub-standard code that just about works, and knitting it loosely together under the auspices of one open source project or another before it is given away for free because it is less feature-rich than rival, commercial offerings.

Headlines like the one in Linux Magazine back in November 2007 – “Peace, Love, and Linux: It’s about free code, man. Free, as in speech. Can you dig it?” – did little to change the perception that open source developers are just a bunch of anti-establishmentarian hippies. Which is why the government’s latest action plan is so important.

Yet the very notion that open source software is written by hobbyists in their bedrooms – let alone hippy hobbyists – also turns out to be some way from the truth. “The open source community definitely helps, but our software is developed by professional developers on our payroll,” says François Mero, EMEA general manager at French open source data integration firm Talend.

Talend, which raised a further $12m in investment in January despite the tough economy, opened its first UK office in Maidenhead in February this year. The firm claims it is winning market share from commercial rivals such as Informatica and IBM, and backs this up by claiming that in the past 12 months, its paying customer base increased by over 300%.

“Talend provides solutions that are all about business,” says Martin James, Talend's UK sales director. “As UK businesses continue to face the economic meltdown, companies are looking for aggressive ways to optimise their IT investments. Talend open source data integration solutions are a flexible answer to deliver tangible business value at a great price.”

“What the community does is not write significant amounts of code, but help you understand the needs of the market, the feature requirements,” Mero adds. “And it definitely helps with QA and testing – we have over 1,000 registered beta testers in the community so we can do far more real-life testing than any proprietary company could hope to.”

Alfresco’s Powell agrees: “You get three things form the [open source] community,” he says. “You get testing, bug fixing and reporting. You get peripheral contributions though this is usually from software partners – for example we are translated into 22 languages thanks to contributions from partners. Thirdly you get help with interfaces to other software, for example our integration with [information capture and exchange firm] Kofax came from the community.

“You occasionally do get some core contribution from the community but you tend to need to do some refactoring or rework,” says Powell. “You don’t just get code from the community and throw it into the mix.”

Not everyone sees it this way. Nick Halsey, VP marketing at a US-based open source start-up in the business intelligence space, Jaspersoft, says, “Some companies are start-ups that happen to choose to be open source. For those companies the community is not that big a deal, which is fine – it’s an observation rather than a criticism. But Jaspersoft was formed around an existing open source project [called Drupal] and there are big chunks of the core product that has been contributed by the community.”

Jaspersoft, which claims it is the world’s most widely adopted business intelligence software (presumably discounting Microsoft Excel) on the basis that it has racked up 8 million downloads worldwide and more than 10,000 commercial customers in 96 countries, just announced version 3.5. Describing it as the first software-as-a-service-enabled BI platform, the firm says 3.5 features a multi-tenant architecture, enhanced user and data scalability, and analysis that does not require a data warehouse or OLAP server.

Government enthusiasm grows

But regardless of the extent to which these companies get core code contributions from the open source community, they are all in agreement about one thing: the government’s latest action plan can only be good news for open source business in the UK. The action plan could not state its intent more clearly: “Over the past five years many government departments have shown that open source can be best for the taxpayer… but we need to increase the pace.”

It’s not perfect, of course, as some commentators have pointed out. Laurent Lachal, Ovum’s open source research director, noted that the plan, “Bites off more than it can chew… is not as pragmatic as it flaunts itself to be... and is badly phrased.”

Lachal also asserts that, “We are not convinced that positive discrimination is the way forward, both on principle and from an implementation perspective. Open source software vendors themselves want to win deals because they provide the best software at the best price rather than because their software is open source.

“However, we do agree that neutrality is a sham if public sector procurement and IT people, as well as suppliers, are not comfortable, confident and knowledgeable when it comes to open source,” he adds, “which is precisely, and rightfully, what the document wishes for.” For more visit Ovum.com for the report 'UK government and open source adoption in a recession'.

Sidebar
Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: the Government’s Action Plan

Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.
This Government has long had the policy, last formally articulated in 2004, that it should seek to use Open Source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services. While we have always respected the long-held beliefs of those who think that governments should favour Open Source on principle, we have always taken the view that the main test should be what is best value for the taxpayer.
Over the past five years many government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services.
But we need to increase the pace:
1. We want to ensure that we continue to use the best possible solutions for public services at the best value for money; and that we pay a fair price for what we have to buy.
2. We want to share and re-use what the taxpayer has already purchased across the public sector – not just to avoid paying twice, but to reduce risks and to drive common, joined up solutions to the common needs of government.
3. We want to encourage innovation and innovators - inside Government by encouraging open source thinking, and outside Government by helping to develop a vibrant market.
4. We want to give leadership to the IT industry and to the wider economy to benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop in Government.
So we consider that the time is now right to build on our record of fairness and achievement and to take further positive action to ensure that Open Source products are fully and fairly considered throughout government IT; to ensure that we specify our requirements and publish our data in terms of Open Standards; and that we seek the same degree of flexibility in our commercial relationships with proprietary software suppliers as are inherent in the open source world.
Tom Watson MP
Minister for Digital Engagement
To see the plan in full, visit http://tinyurl.com/cgbxlh.

CBR Opinion
The government’s action plan on open source may not be perfect, but the key point – that departments should look for economies of scale by being able to reuse open source solutions without having to pay for more and more commercial licenses – will likely prove a shot in the arm for open source in the UK. As for commercial enterprises, there is much food for thought in the plan for them too.

However, they should also note that it emphasises that the approach to open source needs to be pragmatic, i.e. based on value for money rather than principles; the definition of value for money must be based on total lifetime cost of ownership; and fitness for purpose must also be taken into consideration. But open source’s credibility is higher than ever thanks to the UK Government.

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Thanks to Ronnie 44052 on Flickr for the pic (CC licence).

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[It was rumoured today that Apple might buy Twitter -- the Web telegraph system with a maximum count of 140 characters per 'tweet' -- for up to $700m.]

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[It was rumoured today that Apple might buy Twitter -- the Web telegraph system with a maximum word count of 140 characters per 'tweet' -- for up to $700m.]

Pic credit: ping ping on Flickr, CC licence.

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Thanks to Silveira Neto for the original image (CC licence, Flickr).

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Thanks to Chsipita on Flickr (CC Licence) for the pic.

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Thanks to Cimexus on Flickr for the pic (CC licence).

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While the speculation surrounding IBM's rumoured acquisition of Sun tended to assume that there were no other sensible acquisition candidates, I have tended to disagree. It occurred to me that a great acquirer would have been Microsoft. Click continue reading for more.

Microsoft is building out its Azure cloud computing platform as we speak, and has said it needs to build around 40 new data centres round the world to give it the necessary capacity. Sun could save it billions of dollars in that goal alone. Microsoft's .Net software is fine but not quite a match for Sun's Java, nor does it run on the over 10 million devices that Java does.

Microsoft is running out of headroom remaining a software company that does little to embrace the open source model -- Sun has a very strong story in open source and could have radically transformed Microsoft's business into one that adopts a new openness about its software, uses Sun's amazing distribution channels thanks to things like the downloads of Java and MySQL, and create a really compelling stack that went from cloud computing, to open source software, to the desktop.

Sure, Oracle will be able to make all sorts of hay thanks to this acquisition. But I believe Microsoft could have done even more. Oracle expects to be able to add $1.5- to $2bn profit to its bottom line by adding Sun to its mix. But what effect on its database business will MySQL hold in store? And didn't Larry Ellison once say that there was no point buying things like JBoss because he could just take the code and offer it to users wihtout stumping up the acquisition price?

I don't know, it's just a theory. But given Ellison's record, it would not surprise me one iota if the SEC filings which are expected to detail the ins and outs of the Sun sell-off suggest that at least one other massive software powerhouse showed an interest.

Whether or not there's any substance in this thinking, it is surely going to be fascinating to watch what Oracle does with Sun, how seriously it takes its new hardware business, and how it grapples with the acquisition of a vast open source business that doesn't exactly sit easily with its own vast commercial software operation.

But what do you think? Drop me a comment.

Q. I know you won’t be able to say much about the rumours in the press. But if some kind of IBM-Sun deal did happen, would it be interesting to see what you could do combining things like Sun’s NetBeans and IBM’s Eclipse projects?

A. It’s certainly possible. We have been partners on the Java journey for quite a few years. In many ways there would not be a huge impact on Java development. It’s all just speculation at this point.

Q. IBM and Sun seem to be rather different organisations…

A. There would definitely be a culture clash. We’re definitely weirder than they are. We grew up from a bunch of hippies, almost with flowers in our hair. But we’re a much more grown-up company now [than when Sun was founded] with a very different group of people. We’ve become a full-on enterprise software company.

Q. You’re in London addressing developers and partners; what are some of the key themes you have been discussing?

[click continue reading for more on this entry]...

James Gosling, a.k.a the 'father' of Java.

Q. You’re talking about JavaFX, the rich internet application (RIA) development environment. Tell us a bit more about its aims.

A. The idea is to enable people to build desktop-style applications that happen to be deployed over the Web. That means architecturally rich presentation layer, animations and behaviours. It features a rich set of facilities, APIs [application programming interfaces] and components, as well as the right network protocols.

Q. How is this different, or indeed better, than some of the work being done on things like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight?

A. The key difference is that we can draw on all of the performance of the Java platform. That gives this the power to enable people to build even computationally demanding desktop applications that run over the web. Java’s architecture can be incredibly helpful in reducing latency, because you can shift more behaviour to be as close to the user as possible.
It offers potential for everything from deep scientific visualisation to video games. NASA World Wind is a great example [it enables users to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, using a mixture of satellite imagery and radar topography to present 3D views of the earth’s terrain]. Remember there are 10 billion devices that support Java, including 3 billion cellphones.

Q. One of the most enduring things about Java is the virtual machine, that helps to give it its ‘write once, run anywhere’ capability. You must have been watching with interest as so many vendors now espouse the benefits of virtualisation, albeit on a different level?

A. The Java VM is much more abstract than say a Microsoft or VMware VM. There were a variety of issues that drove me to use a VM for Java. We needed to virtualise a very wide variety of hardware – not just Mac, Unix, Linux, Windows but things like cellphones and even smartcards. Also to encapsulate computations and be able to move them around, and handle them in a way that they can be optimised differently and map to individual machines.
VMs were not very common when I did the Java VM, but I had been doing a project I got involved with as a graduate, a PASCAL compiler that used byte codes to represent compiled programs, and I had to target it at other architectures, which gave me the idea of building VMs into bytecode instruction sets. I actually thought about doing a PhD in this but in the end I did it in something else.

Q. The Java VM also helped to keep things secure?

A. Yes it’s a key part of our security story. The VM gives us walls that we can enforce, and decide how they interact with other VMs or islands of computation.

Q. This is the idea of ‘sandboxes’?

A. Yes, so even if you make a mess in one sandbox it can’t leak out into others. The security manager grants you permissions, or it doesn’t. That’s the reason that the largest banks can depend on Java: they need absolute trust. But it’s not just the sandbox paradigm, it’s also an amazing array of Java specs that cover things like ID management, cryptographically secure random number generators and much more.

Q. Sun has recently been talking about its cloud computing strategy: what’s Java’s role there?

A. We have been building kit for clouds for years and years. Now this is the first attempt to build a really open cloud that allows people to do anything. The Java APIs make working in a cloud quite easy. The issues now are how you grant public access, how you bill for it and how you authenticate in that environment.

Q. Will Sun’s cloud platform look like Amazon’s EC2?

A. At some level it will look similar to EC2 but it will feature higher level services. EC2 is mostly raw storage, raw compute power. Ours will also provide higher level facilities. For example the new version of OpenOffice understand the concept of cloud storage, so you can start to store a tree of documents to the cloud, instead of on your own storage arrays.

Q. Do you still think that services oriented architecture (SOA) is the right way to approach software development?

A. I think of SOA the philosophy as like oxygen: you consume it every day, and your life depends on it, but you don’t think about it every day. Object oriented [OO] programming is SOA. SOA is OO in the large, and it’s a very sensible way to design systems. But I’m also a big fan of functional programming [a programming paradigm that emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast with the imperative programming style that emphasizes changes in state]. It’s an interesting set of ideas many developers find hard to use.
A big question remains how you get teams with different skills to contribute equally. Engineering teams aren’t just engineers any more – you find there’s one engineer and the rest went to art school. The waterfall approach [a sequential approach in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards through phases such as conception, analysis, design through to construction, testing and maintenance] is really lousy because it means the artists throw it over the wall to the developers.

Q. Do you think agile is the right approach then?

A. Agile as a philosophy solves a lot of problems but the problem can be a lack of tools support. Standard tooling often forces a waterfall model, and frankly waterfall is hideous.

Q. Java is now fully open source. Do you still feel that you have a role in guiding its direction?

A. That activity is now in a steady state. It’s like, there are rocks over that way, and over that way there is coolness. I try and influence things in the right direction, but there’s such a large community of people that nobody could control it. If anybody tried it would ruin it all.

Q. Since the speculation about a possible IBM acquisition, Sun’s CEO [Jonathan Schwartz] has come in for a great deal of scrutiny and from some quarters, criticism. From where you are standing, is he still the right person to lead Sun?

A. Jonathan is a hoot. I’m a big fan. It’s really been great working with him. If you look at his resume you’ll see he was a math major – he can really be quite analytical. It’s always awkward if the engineers want to do analytical thinking and senior management just wants to pick up Six Sigma and shoot. Jonathan can talk engineering or he can talk management.

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The Wall Street Journal has reported that IBM is on the verge of acquiring Sun Microsystems, the software, systems and services vendor, for $6.5bn...[click continue reading for more on this entry]...

But asked about the different cultures within IBM and Sun, and in particular their developer staff, Gosling said: “There would definitely be a culture clash. We’re definitely weirder than they are.”

“We grew up from a bunch of hippies, almost with flowers in our hair,” said Gosling.

Although the firm was founded in 1982, its proposition, which involved the peddling of open systems in general and Unix in particular -- and more recently its transition into a major contributor to the open source software movement – has given it a certain hippy, perhaps even radical culture. Especially when compared to the more proprietary computing platforms that preceded it, IBM included.

But Gosling suggested that it would still be possible for Sun and IBM staff to settle their differences: “We’re a much more grown-up company now [than when Sun was founded] with a very different group of people. We’ve become a full-on enterprise software company,” he told CBR.

Asked whether it would be interesting to try and in some way combine some of Sun’s NetBeans open source development framework technology with IBM’s rival Eclipse project, Gosling said: “It would certainly be possible. We have been partners on the Java journey for quite a few years. In many ways there would not be a huge impact on Java development.”

But in a statement that perhaps has ramifications for IBM’s rumoured acquisition of Sun, Gosling – the inventor of Java – said that the Java community is now, “Such a large community of people that nobody could control it. If anybody tried, it would ruin it all.”

Java is a programming language as well as a platform, that enables Java applications to run on almost any device in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Sun estimates that there are 10 billion devices that are enabled to run Java today, including around 5 billion smartcards (including the UK’s Oyster Card travel ticket system) and around 3 billion mobile phones and PDAs.

Java was invented by Gosling and released by Sun in 1995. While other programming languages and platforms have come and gone, Java seems able to retain its relevance thanks to its “Write Once, Run Anywhere” capability and the flexibility that enables.

One of the latest major advances in the Java ecosystem is JavaFX, a rich internet application environment that Gosling says has the potential to out-manoeuvre the likes of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Keep an eye on http://www.businessreviewonline.com/blog/ for a longer Q&A with Gosling based on this interview.

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Google Chrome’s incognito mode is meant to keep any sites that you visit during a browsing session – when using Chrome’s incognito mode -- private. Google says incognito mode could be useful if you are looking for presents for the wife, for example, and don’t want her to see which online stores you have visited.

Users of incognito mode would hope that Chrome’s history is kept clear of any site visits they would prefer to keep private – whether shopping for the wife or indeed visiting sites that she or the rest of the family might not approve of.

But it turns out there’s a big flaw with the incognito mode, that effects both Chrome and Firefox. When using Chrome or Firefox to stream media files, it is not uncommon for them to use Windows Media to act as the streaming player – files with extensions such as .avi and .wmv. Only trouble is, Internet Explorer keeps a copy of these file names in the IE history, regardless of whether incognito mode was turned on in Chrome or not.

Users are noting that IE is storing these file type names in its history even when they didn’t realise they were using IE – they were using Chrome or Firefox as their browser of choice but they happened to use IE’s Windows Media capabilities for file streaming.

So I guess for now the advice is either not to stream any media that you would prefer to remain incognito, or if you do, you’re going to have to open IE at the end of your browser session and delete its history.

Thanks to Polybore for bringing this to my attention by posting a comment on one of my previous blog entries – he also found this mention of the problem on Google’s support pages.

I've already blogged about the fact that Chrome incognito mode is not without its problems, even before the streaming media issue was brought to light.

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Insiders say that if IBM does indeed close the deal, the package will include not just Jonathan Schwartz’s blog – and all associated branding including the rights to use the term ‘Jonathan’s Blog’ -- but also an ancilliary hardware, systems and software business that IBM is believed to think “could come in handy if the ass falls out of the blogging market”.

In its latest quarter Sun announced sales down 11%, gross margin as a percentage of revenue down 6.6% and a net loss of $209m. Schwartz said of the results: “It's great to see customers so aggressively embracing open source software, from Solaris to MySQL, alongside Sun's new open source storage platforms as a means of radical cost reduction.”

But while the company was having a tough quarter Schwartz’s blogging prowess suffered no such setbacks. He put a picture of a pair of sneakers next to a blog about major retailers for those not familiar with the concept; he embedded a video of Steve Ballmer’s now infamous “Developers, Developers, Developers!” speech into a blog about, you guessed it, developers.

But perhaps the piece de resistance, he blogged the line: “The storage industry bears a remarkable resemblance to the proprietary server industry [companies like Sun -- Ed.] at the bursting of the internet bubble - closed, highly profitable, frustrating customers with exorbitant charges. Plump, and ripe for change. Like a plum.”

Let's put aside for a moment the fact that Schwartz has just described Sun's server business at the bursting of the Internet bubble as having "frustrated customers with exorbitant charges".

Because, as anyone will tell you, plums too are ‘ripe for change’. You can’t walk past a plum orchard without hearing the little fellas talking about how they want to get out, do something different: change. Plum crumble, plum cake, plum jam – anything but staying a plum! Simply remaining a plum is so, well, plum 1.0.

Of course for anyone who wasn’t aware of The Nature of Plums (i.e. they’re like rolling stones, always moving from place to place, never settling down) or indeed doesn’t know what a plum looks like, Schwartz helpfully included a picture of a plum on his blog entry.

This seminal entry led one IBM insider close to the Jonathan’s Blog acquisition to note sagely: “This isn’t just any blogger. This is a guy who can read the mind of a plum. The $6.5bn valuation obviously needed to take that into account. People will of course say we are paying too much. But do you know of another blogger who knows as much about plums? I didn’t think so.”

A plum.

Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst wants to get Red Hat to the $1bn revenue mark by 2011. So has the ex-airline industry executive got what it takes? Jason Stamper reports.

If incoming CEO Whitehurst lacked open source credentials he was not lacking in credibility: he took the COO role at Delta Airlines just weeks before it was forced into declaring bankruptcy, and he was credited with helping get the company back on track – or at least to get back in the skies.

Whitehurst: the right man for the job? Image (c) CBR 2009; Do Not Copy.

So why did the board want someone like Whitehurst? “The company is at an interesting size,” Whitehurst told CBR on a recent trip to London. “We’re growing very rapidly, doing over $500m in our last fiscal. The board recognised the need for someone who comes from a large company to drive Red Hat forward, and who will put in management reports, processes and so on. We’ve produced the first strategic plan the company has ever done."

Click continue reading for The 451 group analyst Matthew Aslett's view of Whitehurst's strategy, and how CBR sums up Whitehurst's progress so far.

So what is Whitehurst’s big plan? “We’re building out our sales processes and business development capabilities,” he says. “We need to get better at explaining our proposition. When we compete for deals where it’s all about ‘feeds and speeds’, we win those. Companies that use technology for competitive advantage? We do very well there.

“We do very well on Wall Street. We don’t do as well on ‘mainstreet’ – amongst customers who might not consider that they are using technology for competitive advantage,” Whitehurst says. “They have a different set of buying criteria: perhaps it’s more key for them that the technology integrates well with other products, or that their preferred systems integrator has good skills in that particular technology.”

It’s clear that Whitehurst sees the ability for Red Hat technologies to sit comfortably alongside the array of other products in the typical enterprise as pretty vital. Just this month, Red Hat announced an interoperability agreement with one of its closest rivals: Microsoft. Saying that ‘Customer demand has spoken’, Red Hat announced that it will certify Microsoft Windows Server as a guest atop the Red Hat hypervisor, while Microsoft reciprocally will certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests atop the Windows HyperV hypervisor.

“We’re going to forge stronger relationships with other ISVs [independent software vendors] as well as with major SIs [systems integrators],” Whitehurst explains. “We need to build broader commercial capabilities if we are to get from Wall Street to ‘mainstreet’.”

One year anniversary

Around a year into the job, and Whitehurst seems to be settling in rather well. In its latest quarter announced on December 22, it posted sales of $165.3m, up 22%. It makes its money from companies paying subscriptions, which provide them with things like training and up to 24x7 technical support. Its subscription revenue was up 17% year over year.

“Purchasing decisions for IT have changed dramatically for CIOs,” Whitehurst said at the time of the results announcement. “In this budget-constrained environment, IT professionals are adopting open source and more specifically Red Hat to save money and enhance their competitiveness.”

CBR asked Matthew Aslett, an enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group with a close eye on open source, what Red Hat’s latest results say about the firm and about Whitehurst. “Red Hat remains the standard bearer for commercial open source software vendors, and continues to impress with financial growth that shows little sign of being hit by current economic conditions,” Aslett says.

“The company’s subscription model does help to spread the impact of fluctuating demand, however deferred revenue growth has slowed in recent quarters. Nevertheless the company appears to be one of a handful of vendors with the potential to not only weather the storm, but also to thrive.”

“This is in part thanks to the steps Red Hat has taken to diversify its focus,” Aslett continues. “Red Hat noted in announcing its Q2 results that the middleware business is growing twice as fast as Linux business, and although JBoss will still not represent a reportable segment of the company’s revenue this year, Red Hat is now beginning to drive significant revenue from the middleware unit.”

In announcing its latest results, Red Hat conceded that JBoss middleware has a longer sales cycle than its Linux business, something that Aslett believes the firm is working on: “The acquisition of systems integration and consulting firm Amentra will help it deliver better value to JBoss customers,” he says, “and Red Hat has shown that it will be aggressive in targeting existing proprietary middleware users with its MASS migration programme.”

So does it seem that Whitehurst was a good choice? “Eyebrows might have been raised when Red Hat looked outside the technology industry for a successor to Matthew Szulik,” Aslett notes, “but under Whitehurst’s leadership the company has continued to play to its strengths and he has shown himself to have a solid understanding of both Red Hat’s business model and its open source principles.

“Whitehurst also has aggressive growth targets for the company -- 50% of server operating system market share by 2015 and 50% of the entire middleware market by the same year, as well as $1bn in revenue over the next three years,” Aslett notes. “Meeting these targets is probably the biggest challenge that faces Whitehurst and Red Hat. The company will have to be very aggressive and make a number of acquisitions and it will have had to have learnt lessons from the acquisition of JBoss, which posed problems in terms of cultural differences and executive departures,” Aslett says.

Whitehurst is unbowed. “We released more new products in 2008 than in any year in our history,” he says. “Open source ‘commoditises’, standardises, modularises, and it doesn’t lock you in. These are the key values it delivers.

“We think the whole move towards ‘cloud computing’ will work in our favour too,” Whitehurst says. “We’ve been working with customers that have thousands or tens of thousands of x86 servers for quite a while – this is in our wheelhouse. Whether you call it a grid or a cloud I don’t think I care. Amazon’s EC2 [cloud platform] runs Red Hat. You’re going to see more of that.”

Will acquisitions play a stronger part in Whitehurst strategy as he attempts to build it into a $1bn company? “Technology ‘tuck-ins’ could be interesting but really we don’t need technology,” he says. “We need to strengthen our commercial capability. I believe we’re blowing through a straw; I want to at least make it into a pipe.”

CBR Opinion

Whitehurst by his own admission is more of an “operations guy” than a visionary like Matt Szulik. But outlining a strategy that could see the company hit $1bn in three years takes a certain amount of vision too, and things certainly seem to be going in the right direction under his stewardship. Deals like the interoperability agreement with Microsoft prove he and his team are able to put competitive posturing to one side for the sake of customers, and that should help to keep subscription renewals coming in. But it must be said that for the poster child of the open source world to be making under $200m a quarter is pitiful, and shows just how tough it is to get that business model right. As Whitehurst says, “It’s hard to sell free.”

Sources close to the news confirmed that date for the launch of the latest version, which is expected to put greater emphasis on migration technologies, virtualisation, interoperability, 'green' computing and even desktop Linux...[click continue reading for more on this news story]...

At the time of the roadmap announcement, Novell said SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 was planned to offer a variety of products designed for use across the enterprise, from edge and infrastructure servers, to data centre and real-time servers, to desktops in thick- and thin-client modes and technical workstations.

In addition, Novell said it plans to make SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 available as an appliance, supported by a new toolset designed to build specialized images. A new embedded version of SUSE Linux Enterprise is also planned so independent hardware vendors can embed virtualisation and operating systems directly in their hardware.

Novell also plans to deliver optimised versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise for specific independent software vendor (ISV) stacks. In addition, planned investments in new desktop virtualisation technology will decouple end users' computing environments from the underlying hardware and allow them to work anywhere, anytime, according to the firm.

Novell says SUSE Linux Enterprise is the only Linux platform that has been endorsed by Microsoft, SAP and Capgemini. It also claims that it saw invoicing for SUSE Linux Enterprise grow by 200% in fiscal 2007, with new customers including Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Siemens IT Solutions & Services, Casio and HSBC.

When it announced its roadmap in Salt Lake City, Novell said the six key themes for SLES 11 are mission critical data centre technologies; Unix migration; virtualisation; interoperability; green IT and desktop Linux innovation, including, "new features for usability, collaboration and security, enabling greater productivity and lower cost of ownership for business users".