Business & Technology Nexus

You have to tip your “Red Hat” to Larry Ellison. After building a world class support organization, he’s now countered Red Hat’s assault into Oracle’s tools business by unveiling discounted support for linux.

Enterprise customers have to be happy. After all, this is about lower prices for enterprise support for their servers. And Red Hat, as a pure open source firm, has no intellectual capital or other defenses… Yet! You have to assume they are working on a response currently.

Commercial open source firms are going to look at Larry’s move and direct their businesses accordingly. Supporters of open source applications and technology simply must move to mixed models – ones like Coupa where an Enterprise version contains intellectual property hold-back in order to protect the business from being usurped surreptitiously. Either that or build in protections that restrict who can offer support. Both these notions fly in the face of the normal goals of open source and yet seem required to sustain the cash necessary to continue to press forward progress in emerging areas of the movement.

Beyond open source and onto Oracle – I think Larry’s right and this is about Oracle’s right to compete. And compete they will. Oracle’s ability to provide “one stop service” to a complete stack of software – everything from operating system through enterprise applications, is now a reality. And continuing a current Oracle theme, absolutely no engineering or product development was required…