Red Hat: Big News Coming March 14
Red Hat on Wednesday is expected to unveil a “brand-new offering, never before discussed publicly,” a spokesperson tells The VAR Guy.
What’s on tap? Reuters believes the open source company plans to launch an online store featuring Red Hat solutions and certified third-party products.
If true, it’s a great move that also provides several key challenges. Red Hat must provide a level playing field for established open source companies like MySQL and Sugar CRM, as well as smaller rivals such as EnterpriseDB and Centric CRM. Red Hat will also need to ensure that VARs can easily access the store and deploy third-party applications that potentially snap together into solutoons.
If Red Hat opens the online store on Wednesday, it will be the open source industry’s third major attempt in recent months to promote business-oriented applications. SpikeSource has been certifying open source server stacks and the Open Solutions Appliance launched last month to promote application interoperability.
Meanwhile, Linux rival Novell will be watching Red Hat’s moves closely on March 14. Generally speaking, Red Hat has broader ISV support than Novell SuSE Linux. An online store could further extend Red Hat’s lead in that area.
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