News

Red Hat adds open-source DBMS

• By John K. Waters
• July 2, 2001

James Neiser, chief marketing officer of Red Hat, said the product is designed to meet a growing demand for databases for e-business applications. It bridges a gap in the Linux database market, he said, between large enterprise databases that require specialized IT skills and resources and smaller, less capable databases that are affordable, but not sophisticated enough for complex Web and e-business applications.

Neiser contends that Red Hat's entry into the database market can help increase the penetration of open source technology into large corporate data centers. At the same time Red Hat is definitely the new kid on this particular block. Companies such as NuSphere, a distributor of MySQL, and Great Bridge, a distributor of PostGresSQL, have been in the open-source database market for more than a year. As though to underscore Red Hat's relatively recent arrival, Great Bridge celebrated its first anniversary on June 27, which was the day of Red Hat's announcement though the company was said to be 14 months old in June.

Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research at industry analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) believes that Red Hat's packaging of Linux as a database server will help to make open-source software in general more attractive to organizations seeking solutions, but not toolkits. IDC predicts that worldwide relational and object relational databases revenues on Linux and other open source platforms will grow from $42 million in 2000 to $7.8 billion in 2005.

The new Red Hat Database http://www.redhat.com/databasesolution is priced $2,295 for a package that includes the DB version 7.1, Red Hat Linux 7.1, software CD's, documentation, and Web and telephone installation support.