Caldera Responds to New Red Hat Enterprise

"This past week Red Hat announced their Advanced Server product, which they say is aimed clearly at the UNIX market. Caldera would like to comment on this announcement with the following:

• "The Linux and UNIX environments are complementary technologies. Linux is ideal for solutions that require four-way or lower systems, for web serving, file and print services, etc. Caldera's UNIX environments are designed for low-end to high-end database solutions and can scale up to 32 processors, and systems that require extremely high workloads.
• "We believe, and some of Red Hat's own industry partners will tell you, that Linux today cannot scale in the same way that UNIX can. Red Hat has failed to demonstrate that adding 'special sauce' to Linux will make it scale. Red Hat is asking customers to take a risk by buying into this unproven solution.
• "Caldera's UNIX customers have trusted their businesses to Open Server and OpenUNIX for years because they are reliable solutions that are certified on the databases they want to run. They provide the performance, scalability and reliability that they have come to expect from high-end UNIX OS solutions. These customers will not move their server operating system simply because Red Hat has decided to target them.
• "Through our own internal testing, Caldera's UNIX operating systems have consistently achieved 99.999 percent availability and we believe that Red Hat, with this new, unproven solution would find it very difficult to achieve that same degree of reliability while scaling to UNIX's level.
• "Red Hat and Caldera's business models are completely different. Red Hat relies upon a direct model to enterprise customers for the sale of 90 percent of their products. Caldera, which targets the SMB and replicated retail site customer, primarily relies upon an active 16,000-member reseller channel for the majority of its sales. We think that Red Hat will have a difficult time breaking into this loyal reseller channel to gain sales of their products.
• "On the surface, Caldera finds it difficult to understand why Red Hat would go after the UNIX market with this Linux solution, when the larger market and greater opportunity for them would be in competing against Windows."

Red Hat's March 26 Advanced Server Press Release

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• O'Reilly Network: Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History (Mar 05, 2002)
• EL Today: Virtuozzo Enables Over 2000 Instances of Linux On Single Intel-Based Dell Server(Feb 25, 2002)
• Datamation: Linux Gains Legitimacy in the Enterprise(Feb 15, 2002)
• CNET News.com: Red Hat to offer high-end Linux version(Jan 28, 2002)