Yah similar to zapita's reply below, if this person is a driving force in redhat's past, you probably won't see any changes if you liked what they were doing in the past.
Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd though. I can understand how a culture like this would promote systemd's "all or nothing" approach.
The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM.
> The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM.
Very true. Red Hat is a very successful company by any measure. Paul played an important role in making that happen.
At the same time, Red Hat also has a major problem which limits its long-term growth potential: lack of meaningful diversification. RHEL is still the lion's share of their revenue. It's a powerhouse of a business, but its growth is definitely reaching a plateau. So what comes next? As far as I can tell, the answer is: Openshift and Ansible. Both are successful products, for different reasons. But can they grow revenue fast enough to compensate for RHEL's gradual decline? The answer seems to be "not yet". I think Red Hat reached the same conclusion, realized that their stock price would likely peak in 2019/2020 as markets realize the problem, and decided to sell.
And here's the thing: Paul also owns this problem. The failure to differentiate happened on his watch. If you believe Openshift/Ansible revenue is already on the same growth trajectory as RHEL, then success is a matter of execution, and Paul is the right guy for the job. But if you believe that Ansible and Openshift, while good, are just not as game-changing as RHEL once was - then no amount of execution will solve that problem.
EDIT: I meant "diversification", not differentiation! My bad.
Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line. Our integration with IBM might make that even harder to tell since they love to bundle everything into Cloud Paks [2]. You can review our 10Qs to understand our Revenue performance.
What do you mean we lack differentiation? From who or what? Microsoft? AWS? Google? Canonical? SuSe? Apple? VMware? Pivotal? Docker?
When we got acquired, we were the first $3B Open Source company with double-digit percentage growth [3]. And I think there is a brawl going on for big Corporate IT Cloud $$$. You might make the case that Red Hat was completely outgunned in a scenario where a $3B company wanted to compete against $100B companies (AWS, Google, MS, IBM).
> Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc.
Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace.
> So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line
Again, this supports my point. Given the historical importance of RHEL revenue standalone, there is no good reason to bundle it with other streams, other than to hide something. What is being hidden, presumably, is exactly how much Red Hat still depends on good old RHEL renewal, as opposed to genuine demand for their new products.
I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud Computing or Utilities-like conversation at certain levels of many companies. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS, Managed Services (your PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS or "X"aaS). We (Red Hat) have even developed (or are developing) Automation as a Service, AppDev as a Service, Digital Transformation as a Service, (Data) Integration as a Service managed services or service offerings. And obviously for Red Hat, it is all on a foundation of RHEL. But to focus on the OS is short sighted. No one believes an OS by itself is the solution anymore. So you can call them add-ons to RHEL, but things like OpenShift, Ansible, OpenStack, Satellite, etc. also have their add-ons in our catalog.
So, I don't believe we're intentionally trying to hide revenue deltas in one product or another. I think that as computing has changed, customers are no longer asking if an OS can run these 1, 2, 3, dozen apps or network services on a single machine. Instead, they're asking for platforms or services that run their 10K or 100K apps/services in elastic, scalable and manageable ways. And we have platforms for those customers. And those platforms and service generally try to optimize for density and utilization. So that frees up resources for new apps and services.
I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old.
Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
I don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on RHEL & CentOS).
Do you think IBM cloud will get more competitive price and feature wise? AWS (and Google and Azure, etc) are overpriced in many ways (dgress charges anyone?). I would love to see IBM cloud be price competitive. If it also then featured first class Red Hat products that could be compelling even to startup and hobbyists. I'd happily pay the same cost I pay now for a VM to get the equivalent CPU/mem/disk in an OpenShift cluster.
My bad! I meant to say "lack of diversification", as in: too much revenue coming from a single product.
I did not mean to say there was a lack of differentiation - that is a much more subjective and controversial topic.
What I'm talking about is much more straightforward: most of the money comes from RHEL. RHEL is not growing as fast as it used to. And other sources of revenue, like Openshift and Ansible, are not growing fast enough to fill the gap.
Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd though. I can understand how a culture like this would promote systemd's "all or nothing" approach.
The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM.