Red Hat And Oracle Expand E-Commerce Partnership

Linux software vendor Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) has expanded its Internet-centric strategic partnership with Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL), the world’s second largest software company and provider of Linux-based database solutions.

Central to the latest agreement is a new version of the Red Hat Linux OS package that is specifically designed to accelerate the adoption of Linux by firms that are migrating their business operations online. The updated product “will be optimized to meet the increasing high availability, clustering and Java support demands of today’s emerging e-businesses,” said a joint statement.

In practical terms, Oracle and Red Hat will partner with industry and Linux community members to complement the updated Red Hat product with such features as a large file system and memory facilities, along with integrated Java (JRE) and Motif 2.1, among others.

Future enhancements will include backward and forward database and OS compatibility, a Linux journaled filing system, a volume manager and support for Intel Architecture-64 (IA-64).

“Oracle and Red Hat are committed to making Linux an enterprise ready operating environment for Oracle’s powerful Internet solutions,” said Raymond Wong, vice president of Oracle’s Platform technologies division. “We expect this effort to result in an enterprise ready infrastructure with the reliability, scalability, security and robustness required for e-business applications.”

The jointly-produced, optimized version of Red Hat Linux will be available as early as mid-December through Red Hat’s e-commerce and information Web site.

Oracle Does A Linux Red Hat Dance

“Oracle and Red Hat plan to actively promote the availability of Oracle8i and this e-business optimized version of Red Hat Linux by jointly sponsoring TPCC benchmarks during the next three months. “Deploying the combined solutions internally and jointly marketing the availability of the products it offers to enterprises users worldwide,” according to Oracle.

The Oracle8i database was originally certified to run on Red Hat Linux in September, and the announcement served to officially launch the strategic alliance. The two companies have also moved to sponsor a series of educational and enablement programs for independent software vendors (ISVs) and corporate developers.

“Through this continuing partnership, Red Hat and Oracle will bring the scalability of the Oracle Internet platform and the reliability of Red Hat Linux to a broad set of customers,” said Red Hat COO Tim Buckley.

Sales, Not Servers

In June, Red Hat released its E-Commerce Server boxed CD and book set, which included, along with Apache, DAV modules for development, the Netscape Roaming module, an RSA Data Security 128-bit encryption engine, the Squid proxy and cache server and a Web server log.

“The Red Hat Linux E-Commerce Server is an ideal solution for Internet service providers (ISPs) and small businesses that would rather focus their attention on sales than their Web server,” commented Buckley. The release also contains complete and trial versions of e-commerce software products from Hewlett-Packard, and others.