[LUAU] short RHAT?

[Jim Thompson]

On Oct 26, 2006, at 12:03 AM, Julian Yap wrote:

> Red Hat's early response:
>
> http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/

I smell panic.

Its very nearly a response I'd expect from a proprietary (closed  
source) software vendor.

Moreover, Oracle has a very large direct salesforce and a metric ton  
of "resellers".   They've got feet-on-the-street that Red Hat can only
fantasize about.

Oracle can prop-up its "Unbreakable Linux" with revenue from many  
other streams.
Oracle's "top line" (total revenue) is nearly 52X that of Red Hat.
Oracle's "bottom line" (net income) is over 42X that of Red Hats.

Red Hat generated a net income of $79.69M on $278.33M of total  
revenue.   (Annualized 2006)
Oracle generated a net income of $3,381M on $14,380M of total  
revenue.  (again, annualized 2006)

Oracles market cap is nearly 26 X that of Red Hat.
ORCL:   96.74 Billion
RHAT:     3.73 Billion

Meanwhile, any customer in a big sales situation with Red Hat now has  
a benchmark to force deep, deep discounts.

Question:  You're a Fortune 1000 company... you want to deploy some  
linux, but you require rock-solid support from a company
with real assets and a real reputation.   Your choices are:

Red Hat, Canonical (Ubuntu), Sun (Ubuntu), Novel or Oracle.

Who do you choose?

If you're a current Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel customer, its not RedHat.

There has to be a virtualization play in this for Oracle.

Jim