Oracle will do, or not do, whatever they’ve planned, said Tim Yeaton, Red Hat senior VP of worldwide marketing and general manager of products on the recent speculation from investment bank Jefferies and Co that Oracle is about to enter the Linux business.
In the end we’re going to do what the customers want, independently of what Oracle chooses to do, he added, maintaining additionally that there has been no change in the relationship between Red Hat and Oracle in recent months. In the field and in engineering, our relationship with Oracle is very strong.
Jefferies analyst, Katherine Egbert, stated in a research note recently that Oracle was in the process of working to certify its products with the Ubuntu distribution and speculated: The relationship between Oracle and Ubuntu seems to have come together rather quickly, and is perhaps the fallout from an attempt by Red Hat and Oracle to work more closely together.
Egbert said she thought Oracle could introduce a dedicated hardware or software appliance running Ubuntu and its own software, prompting a 6% drop in Red Hat’s share price.
Noting that the company’s share were equally over-responsive to good news Yeaton maintained that Red Hat is looking beyond the operating system. One thing about Red Hat stock is, relatively speaking, it is a volatile stock, he said. It’s really incumbent on us to be clear to the marketplace about what we’re trying to do.
We rarely hear customers ask questions about any individual price of technology, he added. They’re not dwelling on the operating system platform, they’re focused on building a new infrastructure platform.
For Red Hat he said the focus is now on business benefits like driving innovation through virtualization and flexible application models utilizing service oriented architecture and Web 2.0-style user interfaces, the latter of which is enabled by its recent acquisition of JBoss.
