Red Hat plays the cloud alliance game

Maybe alliances will help.

HP is a good name to throw out there, alongside IBM, and if things like the  x64 migration center, which is aimed squarely at Oracle's Solaris, mainly benefit HP it's no big deal. Just as an alliance with AMD may sell some chip sets -- it also sells Red Hat as a big player.

While we're big fans of Red Hat here at ZDNet Open Source, the enterprise cloud space is The Show, and right now BTC Logic has Red Hat listed as "just" a heavyweight, behind IBM and (surprising to casual observers) Amazon.

That's the same level as Google and Microsoft, but it's not enough to impress the stock pickers at Capstone, who have put a "sell" on the stock and expect it to shed 25% of its financial skin. (Commenters disagree.)

What's most interesting is that, in the cloud, Red Hat is going head-to-head against Microsoft, not a fair fight financially, but a virtualized world is lining up in pro-and-anti Microsoft camps, so if Red Hat is heading the anti-Microsoft camp it has a pretty good position.

So can the open source leader win the Big Game? We report, you decide. If they fail, maybe they can get by selling these nifty Amish pot holders. At just $8 each, and with proprietary advantages galore!