Guild Companies

Server and workstation maker Hewlett-Packard and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced yesterday that the two companies had inked a deal that will see HP distribute Red Hat's versions of the Linux operating system and sell Red Hat's installation, update, and support services. The deal gives HP's customers the coveted one-throat-to-choke and makes Linux a tier-one operating system, alongside Windows and HP-UX, at the company. It also gives Red Hat access to the largest installed base of server and workstation customers in the world.

Up until now, according to Mike Evans, vice president of channel sales and development at Red Hat, HP and Red Hat collaborated on the development of Linux for the Intel Itanium 64-bit processors. Both HP and Compaq, before their merger, were active in the Linux community and preinstalled Red Hat operating systems on select numbers of their machines. But their interaction fell short of the worldwide, tier-one agreement that HP and Red Hat announced yesterday. The deal is by no means exclusive. HP works with other Linux distributors and will continue to do so, and Evans says that IBM and Dell have similar relationships with Red Hat, which is the volume leader in the Linux distribution business.

Hugh Jenkins, vice president of marketing for HP's Industry Standard Server unit, says that this move is being driven by customers, but it seems likely that HP is getting a piece of the Red Hat sales action, too. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed, and it could be that no money will change hands and that HP is just happy to push its products and services alongside Red Hat's. Here's why.

According to surveys done by HP, customers are being attracted to Linux because it can now finally support real-world applications and it is available on a wide variety of server and workstation hardware (more than any other operating system platform on the market, in fact). But, says Jenkins, a whopping 89 percent of customers surveyed by HP say that the availability of expertise to install and support Linux solutions and the lack of services to stand behind those installations were the main barriers to the adoption of Linux. "This deal moves Linux from the work bench to the data center," says Jenkins. He says that HP will sell the Red Hat services as well as its own front-end support for its platforms and the services of some 5,000 Linux professionals that the company has located worldwide. He adds that Linux is now shipping on 15 percent of the ProLiant servers that HP rolls out of its factories these days. With this support alliance, that number could skyrocket, or at least both Red Hat and HP hope so.

Under the terms of the deal announced yesterday, HP becomes what is called a "preferred global service provider" for Red Hat's enterprise products, which includes the forthcoming Enterprise Linux WS for workstations, Enterprise Linux ES (a new cut down version of what used to be called Linux Advanced Server, with a lower annual support and update fee), and Enterprise Linux AS (the aforementioned Advanced Server, geared toward eight-way machines). Red Hat is backing up HP's customer support services with its own technical support services as part of the deal as well. The companies will collaborate on sales, marketing, engineering, and other areas. HP, of course, plans to peddle Red Hat's Enterprise Linux editions on its 32-bit Pentium and 64-bit Itanium workstations and servers. Presumably a larger number of the HP machines available for order through its Web sites will come preconfigured with Red Hat Linux as an option, but all of the workstations and servers that support Linux can have those operating systems installed on this HP gear on a configure-to-order basis, even if the Web configurations do not have Linux.