By Rachel Chalmers

Red Hat Inc, the stock market’s darling and its first Linux- related IPO, has expanded its services program to provide consulting and support for Apache Web Server, Sendmail and Postfix, as well as its own Linux distribution. Red Hat’s worldwide services group will offer support for these applications immediately. The company promises that more open source applications will be supported in future. The initiative is aimed at Red Hat’s enterprise accounts, including the Burlington Coat Factory Co, Compaq Computer Corp and IBM Corp. Red Hat executives say enterprises like these are using open source software for point-of-sale applications and in their web server farms. Since these systems are running on Red Hat Linux, and since Red Hat bundles Apache and Sendmail with its operating system, it made sense to offer single-source support.

Cynics might add that Red Hat needs to justify its new, huge market capitalization. But Teresa Spengler, business unit leader for sales, argues: The idea’s always been there. We just needed the organization to follow suit. She notes that one third of Red Hat’s 220 or so employees are engineers. Twenty or so of those engineers are developers and the rest work in technical support. As you get into the higher end, they do overlap, though, she says – the thorniest technical issues are handed up to the developers themselves. So the company certainly had the bandwidth to add Apache, Sendmail and Postfix support. Spengler says little training was required, as most of Red Hat’s engineers were already familiar with other open source packages. Whether that will continue to be true as Red Hat’s support services continue to expand, remains to be seen.