Trilight Zone

[tricore]

At the time, most of us thought Oracle undercutting Red Hat's Linux business with its Unbreakable Linux was a big deal. Would customers flock to Oracle's cut-rate version of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)? Would Red Hat be pounded by Larry Ellison's minions?

After a few months, the answers appear to be: No, it wasn't a big deal; and no; and no.

I was reminded of Oracle's move into Linux this week when I started getting calls from financial analysis firms. They wanted to know if I, as someone who follows Linux closely, had heard of any company actually using or trying out Oracle's Unbreakable Linux in a pilot program. My answer? No. I didn't know of a single company that was even testing Unbreakable Linux seriously, much less deploying it in a trial program.

It turns out that the analysts who called me didn't know of any businesses taking Unbreakable Linux seriously, either. So, we agreed to check into it further and compare notes if we found anyone.

We didn't find anyone.

Maybe this isn't too surprising. Both before, and after, Oracle's move into Linux, I said Oracle getting into the Linux distribution business was dumb. It turns out a lot of people seem to agree with me.

Take, for example, this comment from Oracle's second-quarter earnings call on Nov. 30, 2006: "In the first 30 days, we had 9,000 downloads of Unbreakable Linux from our website and hundreds of customers connecting their servers to our network," said Charles E. Phillips, co-president of Oracle.

9,000 downloads in the first 30 days? That's nothing.

Red Hat's community-based Linux, Fedora Core 6, has averaged almost 100,000 downloads a week since its release on Oct. 24. By early January, Fedora had cracked the million download mark. Other open-source operating systems that have already been downloaded more than a million times, include Ubuntu, openSUSE, and OpenSolaris. Unbreakable Linux? It's not even a blip on the radar.

It's not that Oracle customers don't like Linux. They do. CRN writers Stacy Cowley and Barbara Darrow recently reported that Mick Gallagher, CEO of LS Technologies, an Oracle partner, said, "More and more [Oracle] customers just assume they'll run on Linux."

Oracle is also continuing to move its applications to Linux. On Jan. 31, Oracle announced major new versions across its software line: Oracle E-Business Suite 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, Siebel CRM 8, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, and JD Edwards World A9.1. In the process, Oracle also announced that, for the first time, Siebel CRM, now runs on Linux, specifically Unbreakable Linux. In case you've forgotten, however, Unbreakable Linux is just RHEL without the Red Hat logo.

On Jan. 22, the database giant Oracle got around to releasing a management system for its Linux: Oracle Management Pack for Linux. Based on Oracle's management solution, Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, it's meant to give Unbreakable Linux support program customers comprehensive Linux server lifecycle management, while helping to reduce the complexity and cost of managing their Linux environments. In short, it's a functional clone of Red Hat's RHN (Red Hat Network).

Oracle's VP of Linux engineering, Wim Coekaerts, proclaimed that "The Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program now features the industry's most comprehensive Linux management solution, at no additional cost to users. Drawing upon our wealth of application and systems management expertise, we offer our customers a single, integrated solution that is unmatched by other Linux support providers."

Oracle has also managed recently to partner up with IBM to bring its Unbreakable Linux to Big Blue's z9 series mainframes. Oddly enough, though, the Management Pack didn't make it over.

So, why isn't Unbreakable Linux taking off? It certainly sounds like Oracle is doing everything it can.

I think Unbreakable Linux hasn't really left the starting gate for the same reasons I always thought Oracle getting into the operating system business was a lousy idea. First, people see Oracle as a database and an applications company. They don't see it as an operating system company.

Next, Oracle continues to have a mediocre reputation with CIOs when it comes to delivering the goods. In the most recent CIO Insight Vendor Value Survey, conducted in late 2006 Oracle came in at number 30. And how did Oracle's competitors do compared to the other operating system companies in this enterprise IT vendors contest? Red Hat was number 3; Sun was in 21st place, followed closely by Novell, 23rd and Microsoft, 24rd.

I find it more than a little telling that the company that Oracle was most directly attacking with its Linux move, Red Hat, ranks so much higher in the minds of the people who decide on what's the best operating system for their enterprises.

All the operating system companies are also, to one extent or another, partners with Oracle. Exactly how much support do you think Sun is going to give Oracle's Unbreakable Linux? Even IBM is giving Unbreakable Linux lukewarm support. Yes, IBM is supporting it on its z9 line, but isn't it interesting that IBM isn't supporting the management tools? What good exactly is any mainframe operating system without management tools? We're not talking Windows Media Center in the living room here!

No. Larry Ellison may be the most stubborn man in IT, but I really don't see his Unbreakable Linux breaking into the business market. For Linux, and for operating systems in general, Oracle is the wrong company at the wrong time.