Red Hat or SUSE for the enterprise? Hint: Bet the chameleon

Can someone explain to me how Red Hat got to be the most popular Linux distribution in the U.S.? Technology isn’t the answer; other distros have tangible advantages there. If good marketing is the answer, Red Hat’s days at the top are numbered; with Novell behind it, SuSE is going to kick Red Hat’s crown.

I didn’t install Red Hat myself until I’d been a Linux user for many months. I’d already tried more than half a dozen less popular distros: Mandrake 9.0, SuSE 8.2 and 9.0, Xandros 1.1, Mepis 1.1, Knoppix 3.3, LindowsOS 4.0, Slackware 9.0, and probably a few I’m forgetting. At some point I realized I had a crucial gap in my distro experiences. When someone advised me to try Red Hat for a project I was working on, it seemed time to kill two birds with one stone.

I expected Red Hat to be something special. How else, I figured, could it have managed to capture its large share of the market?

Well, it wasn’t Red Hat’s near-universal application support. The range of available applications is adequate, but not nearly as complete as, say, Mepis.

It wasn’t Red Hat’s unique administration tools. There are none. Mandrake‘s group of management utilities and SuSE‘s YaST application are powerful pluses for those distros. Red Hat lacks anything comparable.

Maybe it was Red Hat Package Manager (now RPM Package Manager), the company’s tool for installing binary applications with all the required dependencies in place. RPM is an excellent tool, but it’s no better than Debian’s apt-get application and .DEB files.

Also perhaps a contributing factor was Red Hat’s large roster of resellers, which act as an extended sales and support force. Most distros don’t even dream of having organizations of that scope.

But today’s Linux market is very different from the software bazaar of just two years ago. IBM has upped the visibility of Linux for everyone, and SuSE’s acquisition by Novell has paired a top distro with a top networking company. Many organizations are very comfortable today with Linux on their servers, and may be ready to start considering it for desktops as well.

Microsoft taught us that it’s easier to sell server operating systems when your customers already use your desktop OS. I suspect Novell is going to show us that the converse works too.

With its background as a network operating system vendor, Novell has always been more server-oriented than desktop-focused. But its purchase of Ximian gave it a vested interest in the desktop, and SuSE plays well in both arenas. I expect to see Novell move aggressively into what is today a wide-open market for Intel-based client alternatives to Windows. While many Linux distros would make fine business desktop clients, in reality only a handful of companies are well-capitalized enough to devote the resources to building the kind of marketing, sales, and support organizations businesses expect.

Red Hat already has the organization, but dropping the Red Hat Linux desktop is a questionable tactic. Maybe the company foresaw an expensive battle for the desktop, and maybe that was a big factor in it cutting loose Red Hat Linux in favor of Fedora. (Though why they picked the name of an existing open source project is another mystery.) A company without both a compelling server and desktop product is bound to be at a disadvantage when trying to sell to the enterprise. No, Red Hat Linux is nothing special, but if one man can code a top-notch distro like Mepis, surely Red Hat’s development staff could do as well or better.

Of course, each business selects what it feels is the best distribution based on its unique problems and needs. But given today’s market, I can’t see any situation where Red Hat and Fedora are likely to be better than the competition.

That doesn’t mean Red Hat can’t continue to win market share. We’ve seen plenty of examples of inferior products that sold like Pet Rocks because of good marketing. But when I think of good marketing in the computer industry, Red Hat is not a name that immediately stands out.

Luckily for Red Hat, neither is Novell. That company could have had the network operating system market locked up 10 years ago if it had been able to sell the benefits of its Novell Directory Services. Instead, Microsoft introduced the inferior Windows NT Server, and through a combination of superb marketing and questionable business tactics pushed Novell to the brink.

Novell’s technology is still first-rate, and its acquisition of SuSE and rapid adoption of open source development methodologies is giving the company new life and energy. Today, SuSE is number two in U.S. market share, and its prospects are excellent, thanks both to the added value of Novell’s network services, which are being ported to Linux, and its new parent’s commitment to regaining enterprise mindshare. By contrast, Fedora is a cast-off project from a company without significant technology differentiators.

The technology marketplace is always volatile. Today Red Hat is the default choice for U.S. businesses. Two years from now, will it even be in the top three?

Articles | Administrator | Tuesday, February 3, 2004 12:00 pm

1 Comment

By Hindsight Guy, Saturday, March 25, 2006 @ 9:39 pm

2006-03-25: Two years have passed since you wrote this article. Incredibly, little has changed. Suse’s distributions — the enterprise and community versions — still remain superior technically to Redhat’s in many important ways, but after two years of Novell involvement with SUSE we observe that Redhat’s market share remains three times larger than SUSE’s. Marketing prowess is partly responsible but market momentum is the real cause of Redhat’s success. That’s what you were talking about two years ago. Where you were wrong is that you didn’t believe this was sustainable. Frankly, that’s what I believed, too. Now I’m not so sure anymore. I have experienced the direct results of market dominance first hand.

A vertical-market application software vendor that my company depends on recently ported their applications from IBM AIX to Linux. They said they would only support Redhat, so my company felt we had no choice but to adopt Redhat as our entry into the world of Linux. I asked this application vendor, which is based in Europe, why it picked Redhat instead of Suse even though Suse offered what I believe is a superior product. The vendor said it also were of the opinion that Suse was technically superior but most of its customers and prospective customers are based in the USA where Redhat is the dominant player, and the vendor believed its products would be more accepted if they guaranteed support on Redhat. Although the vendor is a big name in its niche market, it is not a large company. It cannot afford to support multiple versions of Linux.

I assume this situation is quite typical. That’s why the market momentum of Redhat may be sufficient to assure its dominance for many more years to come. It’s similar to adage that no C.I.O. ever lost his/her job by picking IBM, even though there are other vendors with equal or more compelling solutions.

Two things have to happen for Novell to overcome the dominance of Redhat. First, they have to bribe application vendors to “certify” (really self-certify) their applications on Novell Suse Linux, and in particular this means the vendors have to advertise that they provide application support on Suse. Novell has to offer free education and support and financial channel incentives (e.g. product seeding and big price breaks) to the big ISVs. Novell needs to find niche markets on which to focus; general purpose applications like SAP or Oracle Financials won’t work out because those vendors are big enough to support multiple operating systems and therefore they will support Redhat if they support Suse. Second, they have to start advertising their superior system management capabilities because this means a lot to companies like mine who have dozens of servers and potentially hundreds of linux desktops to support.

Lee Schlesinger

editor and writer