Red Hat seeks respect for JBoss and ecosystem
Reporters hang on every plot twist at Sun, at Firefox, and at Silicon Valley's open source start-ups, while Raleigh-based Red Hat plugs away, dominating the enterprise Linux market, and the press just yawns.
Even Wall Street feels that way. Since its break-out performance of 2005 Red Hat has mainly traded sideways. Moving to the New York Stock Exchange has not changed the trend.
It might be because, except for its 2006 acquisition of JBoss, Red Hat has kept its head down and focused on business.
This week, with its Red Hat Summit and JBoss World show in Chicago, is no exception. While banging the drum for a webcasted press conference at noon today, Red Hat has announced the following items:
- A program to link its partner ecosystem.
- A Java Application Platform targeted at clouds.
- Version 2.3 of the JBoss Operations Network.
- A new certification for JBoss application administrators.
- An open source lab with 60 workstations donated to Carnegie-Mellon.
The only factoid that might wake up sleeping journos here is that the new Carnegie-Mellon lab will be housed in the Gates Center, made possible by a big donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Having covered technology for nearly three decades I can state as a fact that there is a big difference between West Coast and East Coast tech companies. East coast outfits tend to be staid and stable, and are often linked in some way to IBM, which epitomizes that style.
But here's something you probably did not know. Over the last year Red Hat stock, now traded under the symbol RHT, has outperformed the S&P 500, outperformed the Dow Jones average, and even outperformed Microsoft. Its gain in that time is only about 7.5%, but it has gained while others have suffered.
Respect that.