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I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these da
by oso2k 7y ago
I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud Computing or Utilities-like conversation at certain levels of many companies. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS, Managed Services (your PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS or "X"aaS). We (Red Hat) have even developed (or are developing) Automation as a Service, AppDev as a Service, Digital Transformation as a Service, (Data) Integration as a Service managed services or service offerings. And obviously for Red Hat, it is all on a foundation of RHEL. But to focus on the OS is short sighted. No one believes an OS by itself is the solution anymore. So you can call them add-ons to RHEL, but things like OpenShift, Ansible, OpenStack, Satellite, etc. also have their add-ons in our catalog.
So, I don't believe we're intentionally trying to hide revenue deltas in one product or another. I think that as computing has changed, customers are no longer asking if an OS can run these 1, 2, 3, dozen apps or network services on a single machine. Instead, they're asking for platforms or services that run their 10K or 100K apps/services in elastic, scalable and manageable ways. And we have platforms for those customers. And those platforms and service generally try to optimize for density and utilization. So that frees up resources for new apps and services.
- zapita 7y agoI agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old. Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
- oso2k 7y agoI don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on RHEL & CentOS).
- freedomben 7y agoDo you think IBM cloud will get more competitive price and feature wise? AWS (and Google and Azure, etc) are overpriced in many ways (dgress charges anyone?). I would love to see IBM cloud be price competitive. If it also then featured first class Red Hat products that could be compelling even to startup and hobbyists. I'd happily pay the same cost I pay now for a VM to get the equivalent CPU/mem/disk in an OpenShift cluster.