Leading in Enterprise Linux – By the Numbers

Leading in Enterprise Linux – By the Numbers

As Red Hat Enterprise Linux celebrates its first decade of leadership in enterprise Linux software it is a good time to look at the numbers collected by industry-leading market research firms behind its success story. First, of course, is the growth of open source and Linux over the past twenty years. During the 1990s, Linux grew rapidly as a free, innovative operating system used in academic, HPC, research, network infrastructure, and hobbyist environments. There wasn’t any formal product and support ecosystem. But nevertheless it flourished – bringing the power and flexibility of Unix to the commodity x86 market. Red Hat Linux was one of many Linux distributions, and is generally regarded as the most successful.

In early 2002 we launched the first enterprise-focused version of Linux with agoal of providing a stable, supported platform for application developers, hardware suppliers, and customers. The results were impressive. By addressing the risk associated with using constantly changing open source code and providing support for the software, we enabled customers to deploy Linux inbusiness-critical environments. The impact on Unix and other operating systems was dramatic. Ten years later industry research firm IDC published research results substantiating how the operating system industrydeveloped and stating that IDC sees Linux and Microsoft Windows as the two primary established platforms, both now and in the future.

This picture of open source growth spans the software industry, including such areas as web browsers and servers (e.g. Firefox and Apache) and application servers (e.g. Tomcat and JBoss).

Diving a little deeper into the numbers, we can see the role Red Hat played in thedevelopment of the enterprise Linux industry. By offering stability, performance, and security, we have consistently provided the most popular and successful enterprise Linux environment throughout the last decade. It’s always worth bearing in mind that many Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers are running truly mission-critical systems – consider the 28 stock exchanges highlighted in last week’s blog. These customers require the best of the best, regardless of the vendor or development model

The chart below shows IDC’s analysis of the top enterprise Linux vendors in 2008-2010. Red Hat's position is clear.

The same report forecasts an overall CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 18.6% during 2006-2014 for Linux server software (new license shipment/subscription and upgrade/maintenance revenue).

We believe that our leadership today has little to do with first-mover advantage – which rarely lasts a decade – but has everything to do with our prominent roles in the development community. The chart above provides a simple snapshot of Linux kernel developers at the end of 2010 (later numbers are not yet available); and once again shows Red Hat in the lead. Of course, there is more to an enterprise Linux product than the kernel, but the kernel is a vital component. And, complementing our leadership in kernel development, we play a leading role in many other technology areas. Our commitment to being the leading developer of the enterprise Linux environment is demonstrated by growth of our engineering facilities around the world during the past decade. We're not surprised that enterprise customers value this connection, understanding that the developer of the software is likely to be the most competent supplier and supporter.

In the next decade we look forward to driving Red Hat Enterprise Linux deeper into exciting new areas, such as private, public, and hybrid cloud, unstructureddata from social media, and big data and analytics, without forgetting to build on our roots in operating system and middleware.

What Does It Mean To “Ease Into the Cloud”?

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the availability of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta, a major milestone on our march to bring our next-generation platform to enterprises. In the blog post and during last week's webinar we mentioned an idea called “Ease into the Cloud,” but what does that really mean?

AtRed Hat, we have been talking about cloud for years and how it is changing computing, especially enterprise IT. When we started working on cloud-enabling our platform, we had some concrete ideas on what the JBoss experience of “going cloud” should be:

1) Going Cloud Is Not A One-Way Trip – Often when we see a technology shift, the enterprise customer is forced down an irreversible path. In somecases this means re-architecting your apps, rewiring your integration and, with cloud, even potentially rethinking your approach to data, taking time and money away from innovation and results. But that's not how it should be with cloud. Organizations need to move workloads bi-directionally from the cloud to the enterprise, or from the enterprise to the cloud, quickly and easily in either direction. This is why organizations are increasingly specifying open, “hybrid” clouds as a core tenet of their enterprise architecture. There will be cases where organizations must move workloads between different cloud providers and technologies. Whatever the need, enterprises can use JBoss solutions to meet a broad range of needs. This could be based upon load, where you are in the application lifecycle or just to save money. In any case, an application on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) should be easy to run, on-premise or vice versa. Likewise, getting away from traditional data approaches and switching to, for example, Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6, should not mean replacing existing databases but complementingthem for cloud-based applications.

2) Going Cloud Is Not Just About “A” Cloud – While we believe we have the best stack for cloud (from OS on up) we also know that people value the choice Red Hat provides. That is why we areplanning to architect JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 to run well in a variety of environments (including OpenShift, Amazon and VMware). This design principle also extends to other Red Hat cloud efforts. Just as OpenShift seeks to provide a path to the cloud for all developers (Java, mobile, PHP, etc.), JBoss aims to be an application platform for all clouds.

3) Going Cloud Is On YOUR Terms – Not everyone will move to the cloud, or at least not immediately. As far as we are concerned, every organization should be able to choose their own path. One organization's cloud may be an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or basic stuff in a PaaS with everything else on-premise. As a result, we are working to make the technology more easily transferable and investigating how to make subscriptions to Red Hat JBoss Middleware Solutions cloud-ready as well. Last year, we created a newsubscription pricing model that simplified the pricing for bare metal or virtualized deployments. In the future, we plan to make subscriptions for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform available as a part of other Red Hat offerings. We are providing customers the tools and flexibility to move into the cloud at their own pace.

That's how we're helping enterprises “Ease Into the Cloud.” And, again, please check out the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta – available now, and well worth a close look.
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