Red Hat's Revenues and Profits Up in Fiscal Q3
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor and industry leader Red Hat reported its financial results for the fiscal third quarter ended November 30 just before IT Jungle went on holiday, and to say that its numbers were a lot better than Wall Street expected would be an understatement. Things are looking pretty rosy over at Red Hat, but chief executive officer Matthew Szulik less than a week later decided that beginning this year, he will start using an automatic stock trading plan to diversify his portfolio. You can't blame Szulik for that. READ MORE >

IBM Promotes Red Hat, Novell to Top Partner Status
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and services giant IBM made a big $1 billion bet on Linux back at the end of 1999, and has made many billions of dollars since then and amassed a customer base of 12,000 companies who have deployed Linux solutions using Big Blue's hardware, software, and services. Linux is undeniably one of the key drivers for the company's growth, and to that end, IBM has bestowed on commercial Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell the titles of strategic alliance partner, vaulting them to the status of being among the top 10 partners that IBM has among a group of about 100 such partners. READ MORE >

Utility Computing: Homegrown and Open Source Apps to Get the Last Laugh
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As 2005 was drawing to a close, there was a lot of activity surrounding a new twist on a very old idea: the compute utility. Well, to be more precise, utilities are an old idea that were perfected during that industrial revolution for water distribution (and other related public water works such as sewage disposal), transportation, energy distribution, and communications. The question that the IT community is pondering is whether it is possible or desirable for there to be a utility or a collection of utilities for data processing, data storage, networking, and collaboration. READ MORE >

Reading the IT Leaves for 2006
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The 2005 IT budget cycle has ended, and the 2006 budget cycle has begun. And that means the prognosticators, predictors, soothsayers, and auguries of the IT analyst community, and their counterparts on Wall Street, are all gazing into their crystal balls and trying to figure out what is going to happen in 2006 in terms of IT spending and technology trends. Some of you will follow trends, others will buck them, but none of us will escape their effects. READ MORE >