By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
June 11 , 2010

The cloud poses no threat to open-source enterprise Linux vendors–who use the same subscription model as the cloud–because many providers actually rely on open-source platform for their services, a visiting Red Hat executive revealed Wednesday.

Josep Garcia, director of channel sales/inside sales for Asia Pacific/Japan, Red Hat, cited the cases of NTT Japan, IBM, and Amazon’s EC2–all current or potential public cloud players–who use Red Hat’s hypervisor offering to virtualize their servers.

Salesforce.com, a popular cloud CRM vendor, likewise migrated their databases from Sun Spark to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, thereby doubling their overall performance, according to Garcia.

Garcia said more and more businesses–users and providers alike–are seeing and reaping the benefits of migrating to open-source platforms, due mainly to cost.

“Open-source software eliminates the need for license fees, because we use a subscription model,” Garcia clarified, adding that support, upgrades and fixes are already included with every subscription. “By moving to open-source, [firms] reduce spending on capex.”

Community resource pool
But more than cost, Garcia claimed that companies are becoming dependent on open-source platforms because “software developed with open-source are more robust.”

This is because of the community of thousands of developers inherent within these platforms, Garcia said. “The [opportunity for] peer review makes the quality better and innovation much, much faster on open-source,” he added.

Patrick Reidenbach, general manager, UR Solutions, one of three advanced Red Hat partners in the Philippines, observed that even proprietary software vendors are going with the spirit of open-source. “Companies are seeing the value of consulting users. With open-source, it’s the people who decide which features they want included,” he related, adding that the development process is more democratic with open-source.

Specialized skills
One of the gripes about open-source software, however, is the fact that it needs highly specialized skills to maintain, a fact admitted by Garcia, but said that “skills in Linux are now highly pervasive in the country, and we are continually ramping up new administrators for open-source.”

Garcia said Red Hat is fully committed to the Philippine market, which has seen increased adoption of their offerings in the large enterprise and SMB sectors. “We have two of the major telcos using our products, as well as some government offices,” he divulged.

While prospects are good, Garcia said the market is not yet big enough for them to hold office in the country, but the possibilities are rife. “We’ll look into it, although there are no short-term plans as of late,” he added.

Red Hat will continue to sell through its partners, where at least 80% of their revenue from the Asia Pacific region is from. In the Philippines, UR Solutions is one of the handful of Linux distributors around, with at least four Red Hat-certified engineers and eight Red Hat-certified sales people.

Reidenbach said they started out selling their solutions to NGOs and SMBs, but later on realized that open-source has become pervasive in large enterprises. “We saw that there are a lot of companies using Enterprise Linux, so we shifted gears,” he added.

UR Solutions has been a Red Hat Advanced Partner since 2008, a distinction which entails a certain level of commitment from both parties, but earns them additional help and support in terms of promotion and development from the open-source software company.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Philippine BPO industry hails Senate’s passage of cybercrime bill
• You don’t deserve more time, says judge to Facebook, Google: report
• Oracle asks for retrial against SAP in TomorrowNow case
• Microsoft opens C++ extension for other compilers
• Prepare Your Business for Facebook Mobile Ads

 Print This Post