02.14.07
Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat at 7:49 am by Shane Coyle
The very same analyst who sent Red Hat stock crashing after the Oracle announcement has reversed her stance on the company, it would seem.
Egbert now expects a strong finish to Red Hat’s year with next month’s launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 fuelling a cycle of customer upgrades.
She is raising her target price for Red Hat’s stock a whoppping 43 per cent to $30.
Which is interesting, because it was Egbert who downgraded Red Hat’s price nearly 13 per cent last October to $21 when she midread signs of Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) as evidence the database giant was preparing its own open source stack.
Further along in the article is an analysis of Microvell and the non-event that they have also been in Red Hat’s financial outlook, including an insightful look into the timing of some of the big coupon announcements and why "more than 35,000 coupons distributed to date" is unimpressive to analysts:
As for that Novell/Microsoft deal expanding the Linux market… we’ve had four major customers announced in quick succession during December and January, totaling more than 16,000 SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) certificates.
The timing is a little too quick given the deal was only announced in November, and that the PR approval machine on customer announcements is as slow as molasses in winter. It suggests these well-publicized wins owe more to Microsoft milking relationships with existing customers than to any genuine market expansion using SuSE and a relatively tiny number of server sales.
So, who’s the winner here so far?
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat at 1:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It is rather relieving to see that Microvell’s plan to sabotage Red Hat’s business is not very effective. According to UBS analyst Heather Bellini, the Novell/Microsoft deal has had little impact.
She says that the Microsoft/Novell alliance “has not really changed the competitive dynamics in the Linux market.”
According to Jefferies & Co. anlyst Katherine Egbert, Red Hat has suffered no financial losses.
“She noted that Oracle Corp. and Microsoft Corp. announced plans for Linux products four months ago, which hurt Red Hat’s shares, but said the plans have had little financial impact on Red Hat so far.”
Alas, some people are paying more, but they are doing this behind the scenes.
Allison: Yes, that’s true, actually. I mean I have had people come up to me and essentially off the record admit that they had been threatened by Microsoft and had got patent cross license and had essentially taken out a license for Microsoft patents on the free software that they were using, which they then cannot redistribute. I think that would be the restriction. I would have to look quite carefully. So, essentially that’s not allowed. But they’re not telling anyone about it. They’re completely doing it off the record.
The problem with the Novell deal is — Novell gave Microsoft what Microsoft dearly wanted, which is a public admission that they think that Linux violates the Microsoft patent.
So, people are paying Microsoft for the use of Linux and GNU utilities.
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Posted in Boycott Novell at 12:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
SCO has just lost another key man. And as you may have read or heard by now, SCO is going after PJ (of Groklaw), striving to sue (see correction) her (yes! a blogger) for slander, possibly using their ludicrous claim that she is somehow affiliated with IBM.
I thought it would be a suitable time to state that neither Shane nor I have anything whatsoever to do with companies that are affected by Novell, Microsoft, or Linux. Shane and I have got jobs which are not even related to Open Source or trade. Our endeavours here are driven by passion and all the claims made herein are truthful, unless the source that we cite or read happen to be mistaken or unreliable. At times we even defended Novell because we believe in the truth.
So, there’s your disclosure. The informative nature of this blog should never be mistaken for propaganda. And if we ever make a mistake, we urge you to correct it. It would be naive to think that companies are always honest and open with regard to intent. That is the raison d’être of so-called citizen journalism.
Correction: the source where I read this mentioned a lawsuit, but Forbes only speaks about a subpoena.
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