Guild Companies

IBM and Red Hat this week announced that they have forged a broad alliance that will see Big Blue push Red Hat's Linux Advanced Server on IBM's entire line of eServer products. The agreement also includes collaboration on services, through Big Blue's Global Services organization, for the companies' respective Linux products. The deal seems to address many of the problems that have kept corporate customers from buying Linux as an alternative to Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.

IBM has had several prior agreements with Red Hat, and has arrangements similar to this new Red Hat deal with competitors SuSE and Turbolinux. But Red Hat had been playing a little hard to get with IBM and had not come through with the same level of commitment for IBM's zSeries mainframes and pSeries and iSeries midrange machines as SuSE and Turbolinux. At the same time, Red Hat has inked partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Oracle, who are among IBM's main rivals for servers and software platforms. Nonetheless, IBM, with over 4,600 enterprise Linux customers, has the largest part of that commercial Linux market, and Red Hat is the acknowledged volume and revenue leader in the Linux operating system space, so a deal that more closely allied the two companies was inevitable. Both companies' success in Linux depends on the other.

Under the deal, Red Hat has agreed to deliver "mainstream" support for Red Hat Linux Advanced Server on the zSeries, iSeries, and pSeries platforms from IBM. While, technically speaking, customers can download the open source versions of Linux and compile and run them on their machines, or use any PowerPC distribution of Linux on iSeries and pSeries machines, including Red Hat's own distribution, that is not the same as having a shrink-wrapped program that runs out of the box on these machines. By default, Red Hat's various Linux implementations are supported on IBM's Intel-based xSeries machines, using either 32-bit Pentium or 64-bit Itanium processors. (The regular Red Hat Linux 7.2 is not as rugged or as scalable as Linux Advanced Server, which is why IBM and Red Hat are concentrating on Advanced Server under this deal; prior IBM deals dealt with Red Hat distributions that predate Advanced Server, which just started shipping earlier this year.)

In addition to agreeing to support all IBM platforms equally, the two companies have agreed that the software and hardware engineering and development teams at Red Hat and IBM must work together to squeeze as much performance as possible out of all eServer machines running Linux Advanced Server. Availability is not the only issue. Performance is a factor in customer buying decisions.

On the IBM side of the deal, Big Blue has promised that key middleware and database programs will run on Linux Advanced Server. Many of IBM's Domino messaging, WebSphere middleware, and Tivoli systems management and security already run on Intel-based machines, and IBM has agreed to broaden support for this portfolio on Pentium and Itanium machines. In addition, IBM will make its core infrastructure software available on the zSeries, pSeries, and iSeries implementations of Linux Advanced Server, and it will do so during 2003. IBM Global Services has also agreed to provide managed software services for Linux Advanced Server and the Red Hat Network, and the two companies have agreed to create as yet unspecified joint services and support offerings. Under the deal, both parties can customize and mix and match services from the other party to target specific market niches and customer budgets.

The financial terms of the multi-year alliance were not disclosed, but the word on the street is that IBM is paying Red Hat to port Linux Advanced Server to the iSeries, zSeries, and pSeries platforms, something it might not otherwise do, given the relatively low volumes it will see when compared with Intel-based machines.