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Red Hat Software Cloud Linux

Red Hat's Next Steps, According to Its New CEO (zdnet.com) 26

IBM saw its hybrid-cloud revenue jump 18% to $5.9 billion in the last three months, reports ZDNet — while also experiencing "its highest sales growth in a decade.

"Much of that is due to its stand-alone Red Hat division." True, Red Hat sales increased by "only" 12%, which is low by Red Hat standards but darn good by any other standard. So what will Red Hat do now that it has a new CEO, Matt Hicks, and chairman, Paul Cormier?

The answer: Stay the course.

In an interview, Hicks, who's been with Red Hat since 2006, said, "[We'll keep using] the same core fundamentals that we built 20-plus years ago." Why? Because the combination of Linux, open-source software, and top support, "continues to play in new markets, whether that's the shift to cloud and cloud services or to edge computing. In the next couple of quarters. we'll just focus on executing. There's great momentum right now around the open hybrid cloud."

It's not just the cloud, though. Hicks continued, "We have a lot of opportunities. We're also working with General Motors on Ultifi, GM's end-to-end software platform, and two days ago, we announced a partnership with ABB, one of the world's leading manufacturing automation companies. It's pretty cool to see Linux and open source technologies being pulled into these totally new markets in the industry. So my job is not to change anything but keep us executing and capturing the opportunities ahead...."

Moving to the technical side, I asked about Red Hat and CentOS. Hicks replied, "I think it was a necessary shift and change. I'm a big believer in what makes open source work is the contribution cycle, and that wasn't happening with CentOS."

Cormier adds that going forward Linux's biggest contribution to the world may be innovation (and not accessbility), "and that needs contributions. Without it driving open source and Linux, the cloud wouldn't be here."
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Red Hat's Next Steps, According to Its New CEO

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  • by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @09:49AM (#62727140) Journal

    The job of a CEO is to make the big decisions. Little changes to the details of the product or the process are done by devs, line managers, etc. Deciding on changes is the CEOs job. So logically when a new CEO is hired they want to do a good job, and be seen as doing something. So they often do their job with gusto and make a lot of big decisions, big changes.

    Slight problem - they are new and don't really understand the company yet. So they make big changes to something they don't understand. That often doesn't turn out so well.

    "So my job is not to change anything but keep us executing and capturing the opportunities ahead...."

    Fucking brilliant!

  • by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @09:52AM (#62727148) Homepage

    Nobody seriously expected him to admit "yes, the CentOS-stream was a first-class clusterfark, and we don't know what to do to fix it". Just keep consoling yourself that their post-clusterfark revenues are "darn good by any other standard", just keep saying that and you'll be all right.

    I suppose a small number of small-scale CentOS shops wll ante up for an RHEL subscription. But the vast majority will either take a gamble on Rocky (probably a small minority), or migrate to Ubuntu (an overwhelming majority). The bigger the CentOS shop, the more likely that they'll end up going to Ubuntu. I don't have an exact count but we had thousands of VMs running CentOS for dozens of applications. We're not going to break our IT budget, and cough up a small fortune for a shitload of RHEL licenses (insert appropriate "Blazing Saddles" clip here). No, we're rebuilding our VMs to be based on Ubuntu, one chunk at a time and we're on track to be 100% on Ubuntu before CentOS 7 goes EOL.

    I have no reason to believe that we're atypical. This is what Red Hat's brilliant strategy has accomplished: a massive loss of mind-share. Fewer people that are coming up through Linux-based organizations will have exposure to Red Hat's stack, and more people will have exposure to Ubuntu's. Great job, IBM.

    • This. I see the shift happening. Yes, there are licenses purchased at mainstream projects, but stable stuff needs just security patches.

    • by hierofalcon ( 1233282 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @11:15AM (#62727314)

      Our choice was Debian, but we're 100% CentOS free here. Couldn't be happier. Less repository mess, cleaner updates, and much more recent binaries. We no longer have to go to EPEL or others to get something current generation.

      • My shop went Debian after Red Hat 5's licensing (Entitlements) fiasco several years ago, and it was a HUGE step up. We were even massively happier about it after IBM bought Red Hat. We had completed our transition to Debian well before then, and looked back with extreme satisfaction that we had made the right choice ahead of the curve.

      • by jmccue ( 834797 )
        My choice is Slackware, works great. I wish RHEL would stop unintentional making Slackware and like distros miserable. The latest harm is elogin, I heard it no longer maintained.
    • Rocky works great for us, fwiw

    • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @11:51AM (#62727382)

      But the vast majority will either take a gamble on Rocky (probably a small minority), or migrate to Ubuntu (an overwhelming majority). The bigger the CentOS shop, the more likely that they'll end up going to Ubuntu.

      From what I've seen, it's the reverse. Most of the former CentOS shops I'm aware of have migrated either to AlmaLinux or Rocky - the ones that've moved to Ubuntu are almost non-existent.

      There's a non-trivial amount of work involved with switching distros, so you have to make a decent business case for putting in that time and money (IT people-hours). No one expects "Red Hat" to go away, and the GPL means it can never really be taken away.

      • I was going to say that the difficulties of migrating from an RPM-based to an APT-based system would be the biggest hurdle. Then I realized Ubuntu has been for years trying to break free of its Debian roots with its snap packages.
        • This is really only the case if your company is doing something pretty basic - web hosting, for instance - that doesn't involve third-party dependencies. If you've dealt with licensed other-party software, you'll know there are a lot of other complications that can come up - stuff like library / version requirements. There are no guarantees that the software your company depends on for its livelihood will even work on a distro other than your current one.

          I've had some experience with engineering software pa

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            Generally true, but so far moving from CentOS to Ubuntu is proving fairly easy, at least for things like Dyna and Fluent. Some of them have seen the writing on the wall and are moving to formally support Ubuntu instead of or in addition to RHEL/CentOS.

            But for those that are well and truly stuck, there's Rocky and Alma.

            • I welcome wider support of more distributions! And this particular issue isn’t the fault of Red Hat or anybody else on the Linux side of the equation- it’s all on the third-party vendors. But it’s unfortunately true that some fields are beholden to companies that are unable or unwilling to develop and package their software properly.

              I don’t remember the specific software, but there was one company that distributed its software as a tarball with the instructions to unpack it as root u

              • by sjames ( 1099 )

                Agreed, 3rd party software with crazy specific requirements is not the fault of anyone but the vendor. It is possible to write software that can run on nearly anything vaguely Unix like with just a re-compile. Of course, some of the very expensive software has a build process held together with spit and bailing wire with practically no source control and certainly no dependency tracking. Add in a decade or two of promiscuous kitchen sinking of linked libraries and it's a real mess.

                When the software is old e

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          That would make sense with any other distro, but RHEL has been messed up for years now such that upgrading to the next major version means blast it back to the bare metal and start again. If you're already committed to that, the start again might as well be an apt based system.

      • Alma, here.
        So far so good. About half of our couple hundred servers migrated.
    • Nah you're small potatoes to them.

      IBM doesn't want the small accounts, the medium and big corporations use wares targeting Red Hat and SuSe that also happen to run on CentOS so in many cases customers will use that.

      Such places do have the budget if necessary for $800 and up for each red hat server, if they can avoid that it's nice but hardly "small fortune"

    • >"suppose a small number of small-scale CentOS shops wll ante up for an RHEL subscription. But the vast majority will either take a gamble on Rocky (probably a small minority), or migrate to Ubuntu (an overwhelming majority)."

      We immediately shifted to Alma Linux, which has been out longer than Rocky and with perhaps more installations (why would you mention ONLY Rocky Linux?). Hopefully things will work out OK. We have been using RHEL and CentOS for a very long time and were not interested in shifting

    • CentOS Stream is a great idea from where I stand. There is massive consumption of centos/rocky/alma but no community or contribution. Now there's an opportunity for rocky/alma and their users to contribute bug fixes and improvements via Stream, rather than just sit there and wait for red hat to fix it once a paying customer identifies the issue.
  • by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @10:01AM (#62727174)
    His most important job is to identify up-and-coming talent from within Redhat and put them into positions where they'll be effective.

    He needs to keep IBM bean counters away from leadership positions.

    Matt Hicks himself had an "unconventional" rise to the top, and if bean counters like thegarbz had his way, he'd be overlooked because he didn't have the exact on-paper skills for the job.
  • IBM "cloud strategy" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @10:11AM (#62727194)

    I wouldn't be betting the farm on that revenue continuing. A cloud strategy relying on Openshift with the addition of IBM sales and maintenance bloat layered in along with other bloated products from the IBM inventory. Yeah, that's the ticket. You can already see companies retooling to consume nekkid K8S/EKS/GKE/etc to avoid getting sucked into that gravity well.

    The slow motion train wreck is going to be delicious to watch. Almost as much fun as watching Broadcom bone existing VMWare customers and inevitably gut that revenue stream like they've done with other acquisitions in the past.

    Load up on popcorn.

  • In Support Delivery at Red Hat, we have three rules:

    1) no one knows anything
    2) no one can help you
    3) no one cares

  • Over the past few years Iâ(TM)ve seen an abandonment of RedHat-based distros being used. What once was CoreOS, RHEL, Fedora and CentOS seems to now have shifted almost exclusively to Ubuntu. Iâ(TM)ll leave reasons âoewhyâ to speculationâ¦.

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