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Into the cloud

But this isn't the whole story. Red Hat has built its business model on the rise of Linux as the base of a universal operating system. As Linux has proved its scalability and versatility it has become commoditised. Linux can now be found on everything from the mainframe to the wireless router, from the vehicle management system in your car to the smartphone in your shirt pocket. As the OS loses value and free software rises further up the stack, Red Hat's emphasis inevitably moves from the OS and OS services to middleware and software services that sit further up the stack.

Such was the motivation for the acquisition of JBoss, the middleware application server software company, and the only rival to Red Hat's status as the pure open source company of note. Since early rumours of developer discontent, JBoss has become the fastest growing section of Red Hat and dominates its sector of the market, and like Red Hat, comes top in customer satisfaction surveys, but is now being challenged by VMWare's purchase of SpringSource, which sees itself as a rival to JBoss - a view not wholeheartedly shared by Marc Fleury.

Red Hat has been slow to make direct inroads into the market for virtualisation, although Linux has often been the server platform for virtualisation solutions. Virtualisation is a market that is dominated by VMWare, but Red Hat is looking to become a significant player in this market with the 2008 acquisition of KVM and the recent first release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. KVM has some technical advantages over competitors in that it is relatively lean, native to the Linux kernel as of kernel version 2.6.20, and avoids the hooks necessary to integrate competing products into the kernel.

Just as Red Hat has purchased its own virtualisation solution and released it to the community, so VMWare has purchased SpringSource an open source Java developer framework that uses a mixture of open source licenses and covers some of the same ground as JBoss. Both Red Hat and VMWare are making a play for the "cloud", Java and mobile technologies.

Some, like Matt Assay, take the view that "SpringSource's ubiquitous Spring Framework already threatened Red Hat's booming JBoss business. But add VMWare's leading virtualization technology and suddenly Red Hat is under siege by a highly credible and disruptive competitor that could well outflank it."

It may be said that Red Hat is equally well placed to outflank VMWare's play for the cloud, offering the market leader in JBoss, and a virtualisation option that has been released as free software and is native to the operating system, where Red Hat has knowledge and expertise.

SpringSource is still to prove itself as a profitable competitor to JBoss, despite the combative stance of Rod Johnson, the founder of SpringSource, and its growing popularity among developers. Not everybody agrees with Johnson's assessment of the comparative virtues of SpringSource and JBoss, and the scene is set for some interesting moves in the months to come as JBoss and SpringSource, Red Hat and VMWare, jostle for position in the higher reaches of cloud architecture.

Next: The Red Hat trick

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