New CEO Must Prove Red Hat's More Than A One-Trick PonyNew CEO Must Prove Red Hat's More Than A One-Trick Pony

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Red Hat also needs to execute on its services. Laurent Rochette, as manager of alliances at Mentor Graphics, which builds graphics systems to run on Unix and Linux, buys thousands of Linux desktops from Red Hat; Mentor Graphics gets rights to others for free, as a developer of Red Hat applications. During subscription renewal, the purchased systems were automatically renewed. The developers' systems, however, were allowed to expire, and Rochette spent two weeks getting the problem solved so Mentor Graphics' developers could work from updated systems. "It took a while for them to recognize and fix the problem," Rochette says. "They need to make progress in their business operations."

Even more serious are cases like ValueCentric, which stopped using the MySQL database running on Red Hat Linux for its pharmaceutical data because of performance problems with MySQL. The system was trying to load, manage, analyze, and report on data in two databases that added up to 800 Gbytes. Switching to Oracle solved the database problems--and opened the door to using Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

John LoFaso, ValueCentric's director of technical operations, says Unbreakable Linux is tuned to run a database, and Oracle offers one Web site that supports both Linux and Oracle databases together. In troubleshooting one problem, LoFaso found ValueCentric was using the wrong version of a SCSI driver in Linux to work with Oracle ASM, and it was slowing data storage. That information came from one source, instead of correlating information from Red Hat and MySQL. The switch to Oracle cut 30% of his administrative overhead, LoFaso says.

Red Hat also should worry that IBM will seek an additional source of Linux, besides Red Hat and Novell's SUSE, says Dave Rosenberg, CEO of MuleSource, the company developing the open source Mule enterprise service bus and messaging middleware. The increasingly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution could give IBM a Linux option that's viable for both desktop and server, he says. Ubuntu has been capturing PC users faster than Red Hat, and it now has a server version.

To meet these challenges, Red Hat must execute on its subscription services and not leave customers hanging. It needs a CEO who articulates where Red Hat stands in the sea of contending, and contentious, voices between proprietary and open source systems. The company needs to stake out what its main business is and explain how it's going to fulfill it. Fleury thinks Whitehurst can negotiate that new role. "This is a company in transition," he says. "Coopetition is a norm in the industry. Articulating it is a new trick for Red Hat."

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Q&A With New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst