Three months ago Oracle CEO Larry Ellison surprised the open source world by announcing its Unbreakable Linux program, claiming it could offer and support a distribution of the operating system cheaper Red Hat.
Since then, however, there’s no evidence that Oracle has made any headway in the market.
“We don’t get a lot of requests for Oracle on Linux,” said John Prince, chief information officer of Albert White Technologies, a Markham, Ont. Oracle and Novell Suse Linux partner.
“We get a few for UAT or DES (Data Encryption Standard) for testing, but in production, that’s a different discussion.”
Forrester Research analyst Michael Goulde said that “we’re still in a wait and see mode.”
While the company has said there are considerable downloads of what is called Oracle Enterprise 4.0, “people will download just about anything that’s free. The real question is how many people will convert to engaging in support contracts.”
A spokesperson for Oracle said the company is in a quiet mode prior to the release of its next quarterly figures, expected in the middle of March, and could not comment on Unbreakable Linux support sales.
“I haven’t heard a lot of interest from customers about going with Oracle over Red Hat,” said Goulde.
“There’s a lot of concern about compatibility, and I think they want to see if Oracle establishes a track record of being able to deliver what it promised and its claims that it will not create an incompatible version of Linux.”
Oracle is taking the Red Hat Enterprise source code, compiling it into binary code – completely allowed under the open source General Public License – and applying fixes and patches, then offering round the clock support and services.
Oracle says it’s basic support is less than half the price of Red Hat’s best service level, while its premier support is equal to Oracle database support.
“We believe that better support and lower support prices will speed the adoption of Linux, and we are working closely with our partners to make that happen,” Ellison said at the time.
Prince recalled feeling grateful at Ellison’s announcement. “It gives us more opportunity to drive other opportunities into the Linux market that a big company like Oracle can stand behind.”
“But am I going to make a lot of money out of it? No. Is it a stepping stone towards Linux with Oracle on a virtualized environment? Okay, you got my attention, but has it moved my day?”
Forrester’s Goulde acknowledged that it’s still early – organizations will want to test Unbreakable Linux before signing up for support. But he’s skeptical it will go far.
He assumes Oracle wants to have control over a complete operating system stack to optimize it for the company’s applications.
“But it’s not clear that the [open source] market is open to that,” Goulde said. “The market has pretty much proven that it likes to choice out there, particularly when its making such a sizable investment in the Oracle database, I think they want to be able to chose the platform they’re going to deploy it on.”
In a recent research note directed at Forrester’s Asia Pacific customers, analyst Tim Sheedy noted that the recent increase in popularity of Linux is being driven by the certification several hardware and software vendors have given to Linux-server combinations – including Oracle database and Red Hat Linux on Hewlett-Packard servers.
To win the support of new customers, Sheedy suggested, Oracle should take Enterprise Linux 4.0 through the same certification process, which is, he observed, a costly and time intensive exercise.
