Surveys done by HP of current and prospective Linux customers indicate that 89% of these customers say that the main barrier to using Linux in the data center – or indeed, anywhere else in their organizations such as on departmental file servers or remote offices – is the lack of expertise either inside their own organizations or among the hardware/software vendor community with Linux solutions and the lack of services to keep those solutions up and running.

So, this week HP and Red Hat, the dominant distributor of commercial Linux, did something about it. HP has inked an expanded alliance with Red Hat that will allow HP to directly sell Red Hat’s distributions and support and update services so customers can go to HP for all Linux support, soup to nuts.

The financial terms of the agreement between HP and Red were not disclosed, but with HP being one of the dominant server vendors in the world, anything it does or doesn’t do can shift whole markets, much as is the case with IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and to a lesser extent Dell Computer Corp and Fujitsu Siemens.

HP sold some $2bn worth of hardware, software, and services related to Linux in 2002, and company executives have said that they hope to double that number within the next year or so. Providing the one throat to choke for Red Hat Linux customers – something that IBM and Dell already do since they already have the preferred global provider status with Red Hat that HP has just got – is clearly part of this plan. HP may be getting a slice of Red Hat’s services sales, or it may not. Neither HP nor Red Hat are saying. But even if HP is just getting a modest commission on Red Hat sales, it stands to make a lot more money keeping its 5,000 Linux services professionals busy and pushing all kinds of iron if such a deal with Red Hat can make it easier to move Linux into the data center.

The Red Hat deal with HP is not, said Jenkins, exclusive, which seems to indicate that HP will at some time in the future possibly be working with the UnitedLinux partners (SuSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva, and SCO) on similar alliances for their Linux distributions. No word on when and if that might happen. But it is clear that in some markets and among some customers, Red Hat is not what customers want or have, and HP will have to provide a similar support structure for these Linuxes as well.

Under the agreement, HP will sell Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux WS for workstations, its midrange Enterprise Linux ES for two-way servers with up to 4GB of main memory, and its top-end Enterprise Linux AS (formerly known as Linux Advanced Server) for four-way and eight-way servers with up to 16GB of main memory. HP’s customer support for Red Hat products will be backed up by Red Hat’s own technical support services, but customers will interface with HP.

With this alliance, Linux becomes what Jenkins is calling a tier one operating system at HP, taking its place besides HP’s own HP-UX Unix variant and Microsoft Corp’s Windows.

Source: Computerwire