Red Hat Inc. began a program for Israeli startups designed to boost use of its open-source software and increase sales as more companies migrate to cloud computing.

“Our goal is for next-generation Internet service providers to build on our platform,” Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst told reporters in Tel Aviv. “As they grow, their customers will buy our software.”

Seven Israeli early stage technology companies with revenue of less than $1.5 million each were chosen to get free access to Red Hat enterprise software. The program will be expanded in Israel before being extended to other nations, Whitehurst said. Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer its software at a declining discount as the companies’ sales grow.

Red Hat, the largest seller of Linux software, intends to triple its sales to $3 billion in five years, boosted by the rising popularity of cloud computing, Whitehurst said in June. Companies such as Amazon.com Inc. are expanding cloud-computing sales in the U.S. as the government shifts $20 billion of the $80 billion in yearly information-technology spending to the services, which let users share resources such as data storage and software.

‘More Acquisitive’

Red Hat, which acquired an Israeli company three years ago, doesn’t necessarily plan to buy startups that enter the program, Whitehurst said in an interview. Even so, Red Hat will “be significantly more acquisitive than we have been,” he said.

The software developer is looking at a number of companies and is searching for “really interesting technology,” the CEO said, declining to elaborate.

Startups included now in the program include Totango Ltd., which analyzes online interactions with customers; Porticor Ltd., a security provider that encrypts data on the cloud; and Cloudyn Inc., whose software helps clients organize their use of cloud computing.

Red Hat agreed to acquire Gluster Inc. last month for about $136 million to extend its cloud-computing offering into storage, a move that will partly insulate the company from an expected shortage in hard drives following the recent flooding in Thailand, Whitehurst said.

The CEO said he doesn’t expect the European debt crisis and forecasts of slowing technology spending to affect the company’s prediction for double-digit growth.

“Open source does very well in a down market,” he said. “It gets companies out of their comfort zone and they have to find ways to take costs out.”

The company raised its full-year sales forecast in September to as much as $1.13 billion from up to $1.09 billion.

Israel, whose population of 7.7 million is similar to Switzerland’s, has about 60 companies listed on the Nasdaq, the second-most of any country outside North America, after China. Matrix IT Ltd., Red Hat’s Israeli partner, will shepherd the startup program.

Source:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-09/red-hat-assists-israeli-startups-to-boost-software-revenue.html

LINUX VENDOR Red Hat, the open source stalwart, wants to improve the US patent system so that it and other firms can challenge poor quality software patents.

The company joined a host of others in the industry in sending an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court. In the brief the firms explain that the burden of proof required to invalidate bogus software patents holds back innovation and needs changing.

The Amicus Brief (pdf) was filed in the case Microsoft v. i4i Limited Partnership, and Red Hat joined with firms including Google, Verison, Comcast, Dell, Hewlett Packard,. Mastercard and Time Warner, each of which is likely to have their own reasons for arguing that software patents are out of control.

At issue is the fact that it is up to defendants in patent lawsuits to prove that another firm has been granted a ridiculous patent. According to the complainants, the current system favours the holders of dodgy patents.

Perhaps sensing that all this talk about burdens of proof might confuse people, Red Hat threw one of its legal team in to explain in its statement.

“Burdens of proof sound technical, but they make an enormous practical difference in how lawsuits come out,” said Rob Tiller, an assistant general counsel at Red Hat.

“As things now stand, the clear-and-convincing burden prevents invalidation of lots of patents that should never have been granted. A decision from the Court which corrects that would be great for software innovation.”

Source:http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2024074/red-hat-joins-patent-push

Evolven Software, Inc., the pioneer of Granular Configuration Automation solutions, entered into a formal partnership relation with Red Hat.

According to the partnership, Evolven will join Red Hat’s (News – Alert) ISV Partner Program and create joint solutions aimed at offering greater visibility into granular configuration information that can affect the performance of applications based on Red Hat technologies.

“Through our work with Red Hat and the Red Hat ISV program, we’re looking to reduce the risk of production outages, minimize downtime, and enhance security for environments running business systems based on Red Hat technologies and under Red Hat Enterprise operating systems,” said Sasha Gilenson, CEO of Evolven, in a press release. “We’re excited to support Red Hat’s upcoming releases, and allow our customers to maintain IT environment stability throughout their application stack.”

To increase visibility and control into configuration parameters and content of critical business systems and their underlying infrastructure during the deployment of new releases and patches, ongoing changes, operation and maintenance of the systems, the combination of Evolven and Red Hat solutions has been designed.

The customers, through the certification of Evolven Comparison with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as support for JBoss are offered with the ability to compare environments down to the granular level. In order to reduce risk to stability, security and compliance of their physical, virtual or cloud-based IT environments, the IT teams apply this approach.

Qualified vendors, with the help of the Red Hat ISV Program are provided with easy access to the tools and resources necessary to develop and test their products on Red Hat technologies. Additionally, Evolven, through the program’s co-marketing and co-branding offerings, will make its flagship solution, Evolven Comparison available to Red Hat customers worldwide.

Being a Granular Configuration Automation solution, Evolven Comparison allows IT organizations to compare their complicated IT environments with a historical snapshot or golden baseline for analyzing changes and differences with a focus on criticality, as well as impact.

In related news, Barceló Viajes, a premier Spanish travel operator, has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to consolidate its datacenters that support the company’s mission-critical business platforms.

Source:http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/112118-evolven-software-announces-partnership-with-red-hat.htm

iCreate Software announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring’s top 100 Asia award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the Asia business region.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Asia. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an invaluable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

“This year was especially difficult,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “Despite the global economic situation, there were many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products that we had a difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. iCreate Software shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Winners of the Top 100 Asia Award.

Finalists for the award are selected based upon their technological innovation, management strength, market size, investor record, customer acquisition, and financial health. During the several months leading up to the announcement, hundreds of companies in the mobile, security, Web 2.0, software, hardware, biotech, and clean tech industries sent in their submissions to qualify for the award.

The Finalists are invited to present their winning strategies at the Red Herring Asia forum in Shanghai, November 15-16, 2010. The Top 100 winners will be announced at a special awards ceremony on November 16 at the event.

Source:http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2010/Oct/26/iCreate_Software_is_a_Finalist_for_the_2010_Red_Herring_100_Asia_Award.html

The commercial software industry is failing enterprise customers through overpricing, lengthy development cycles, and products with bloated feature sets that most customers don’t use, said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who spoke Wednesday during a keynote presentation at the Interop IT Conference and Expo in New York City.

“It’s the vendors,” said Whitehurst. “There’s been no change in productivity in thirty years,” he said, noting that commercial software products typically suffer from the same bug rates as they did three decades ago. “The business model is broken,” said Whitehurst.

The main problem, according to Whitehurst, is a commercial development model under which executives, programmers, and marketers get together in an effort to predict what their customers want-and then take five years to build it.

As a result, “half of all IT projects fail,” said Whitehurst.

Not surprisingly, given his position atop a major Linux distributor, Whitehurst said open source development models offer fixes for many of the ills that plague commercial software.

Most significantly, open source allows customers to participate in the product development cycle.

“All I need to worry about is whether our architecture participants include Google, Yahoo, and Amazon,” said Whitehurst, referring to some of Red Hat’s biggest customers.

“Our solutions aren’t based on our ideas about what you want. Our customers are building them,” he said.

Whitehurst was followed on stage at Interop by Cisco VP Ben Gibson and Xirrus CEO Dirk Gates.

Gibson noted that, in addition to new software development models, the IT industry is embracing a best-of-breed approach to infrastructure build outs, under which multiple vendors partner to construct tightly integrated system stacks.

“The vendor community is working together in new and interesting ways,” said Gibson, who cited Hewlett-Packard’s recent server partnership with Microsoft as an example.

“Best of breed vendors are working together while maintaining customer choice,” said Gibson.

“If vendors can do more integration up front it’s an opportunity for IT professionals to get ahead of the curve” and add innovation, said Gibson.

Gates, for his part, said another feature that will become commonplace in the modern enterprise is wireless mobility.

“Mobility is the driving factor that is pushing us toward using wireless technologies,” said Gates, who noted that employees are coming to expect access in the workplace to the technologies they use daily in their personal lives.

Gates said new wireless standards, like 802.11n, are just as fast and secure as wired LANs, and perhaps more so.

Gates demonstrated the power of today’s state-of-the art Wi-Fi systems by showing off a single Xirrus wireless tower powering 96 iPads distributed across eight racks.

“Mobility creates such an improvement in our productivity it’s inevitable,” said Gates.

Interop, hosted by InformationWeek.com publisher UBM Techweb, runs through Oct. 22 at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side.

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900364&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News