Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish 215
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by
ScuttleMonkey
from the focus-is-everything dept.
from the focus-is-everything dept.
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
Not that impressive (Score:2, Interesting)
While I'm glad and all that they are so called flourishing in the recession, they are getting 194 million in revenue.
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Even if it wasn't gross income, it wouldn't be that impressive.
Also, people seeking a cheaper option in a recession?
Have we ever heard that before?
Re:Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! (Score:3, Interesting)
The summary made it sound like it was something extremely unique, special, and peculiar. It's not. I was bringing the point that their business model doesn't make them necessarily different than someone just selling licenses, as support is not optional, something that isn't mentioned at all in the summary.
Thank you for assuming I'm an illiterate idiot, though.
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why they have the concept of "support levels." In most cases if you have Basic support it means you get access to their private online knowledge base and a VoIP line to an outsourced guy behind a desk on the other side of the planet.
If you're an Enterprise then you have direct access to a bunch of very smart guys who come buy your team dinner when they're in town.
Re:To be expected, really. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not Optional (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm quite sure that Redhat's "support" model is designed to frustrate and confuse.
Before Redhat switched to this model, we could throw up servers right-left and center. Virtualization around the corner, we could sprout servers like mad. Pay-per-incident was reasonable, and RHEL certification desirable.
Big corps standardized on Redhat as a target distro. It was the big American Software Company which looked like it was going to stay around for a long time. People bought in bigtime in development dollars and in the datacenter.
Then the model changed.
The talk wasn't so colorful, but that was the gist of it. Redhat made me and other FOSS proponents look like idiots. I'm not a Redhat fan, I just use it at work.
This little stunt took a LOT of steam out of the mainstream adoption of Linux. I'd really like to see Debian pick up, but Redhat already seems to have had the branding and developer lock-in, and the big name seems to make bosses feel comfortable. They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
... sadly, explaining CentOS to them is like telling them that I sourced Oracle from TPB.
Grr. The most annoying part is that like I said, Redhat does good work outside their distro... I wish I could hate them. Doing FOSS advocacy and development and being charged licensing fees is like being a philanthropist being robbed by Robin Hood. Robin's a real jerk. We were ALREADY paying and contributing!
Re:To be expected, really. (Score:3, Interesting)
You're practically answering your own question. The next economic boom will be about leveraging those newfangled 'open source' technologies in order to gain unprecedented profits (because after all, that's what defines an economic boom). In the downturn after that we will both have a very good open source ecosystem and on the other hand a lot of people blaming open source because they couldn't get their profit out of it.
The only problems are going to be patents which, if not eliminated by or during the next economic boom will cause the next economic downturn. Of course then maybe patents will be overturned OR all patents will slowly start to expire causing the next boom (an open-source-like environment without having encumbering patents)
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless your scope is kept very shallow and/or very focused, you will never be doing anything more than tweaking applications or simple debugging. The codebase for most apps is too large and if it's not your primary job / hobby then you won't have time to learn it, let alone keep up with its development.
It's wise for each company to know where they stand when making any IT expenditures, whether the goal is to have a large Help Desk for instance or outsource everything beyond a certain scope. I don't run cabling anymore, and although I could if needed, we pay contractors for that stuff. Just like I implement systems using MySQL, but I don't tweak its source or try to perform bugfixes myself (beyond Googling for answers to questions) because I have other things to do. I support other databases and systems, and I have other apps to code. My time is most valuable to my employer for these tasks, and I'm a lot more expensive than spending a few thousand a year per server for support.
Need an example? OK. We successfully implemented a fiber card in 2 of our blades (RHEL 5.4 with kernels from 5.1) and this week brought up a third blade (same model, same base OS) only this time using RHEL 5.4 with KVM for virtualization. The kernel is 5.4 and the HP drivers won't install. The issue appears that one of the RPM's (lpfc IIRC) won't install because 5.3 and higher is not supported. The support grid at HP says that 5.4 is supported. Now I need to implement the entire tested solution by the end of next week.
Do I want to play around with this? No. I have one of our network admins contact HP and work it out, and when they're finished, give me a written set of instructions which I will add to my documentation. That's how larger businesses handle this stuff.
Re:Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! (Score:3, Interesting)
Question: as I am not a Linux guy I don't know so maybe someone here can answer: which is more expensive, just buying a Windows 7 Pro license, or getting RHEL for free and paying support for 5 years? Honestly I don't have a clue, all I know is I can usually pick up a Windows pro OEM for usually around $130-150. So which is more expensive?
Personally I wish RHEL all the luck in the world, because my admin buddies swear by it. They say it is rock solid and the tools are top notch, I was just wondering which one works out to be cheaper. Does MSFT make more $$$ per unit by going upfront, or does RH by going long term?