The booming Chinese market for Linux solutions witnessed the birth of
another alliance Wednesday, as home-grown market leader Red Flag Software
joined Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux program through the
company’s Oracle China subsidiary.
The alliance means that Oracle has now brought two of China’s largest Linux
distributors — Turbolinux (through the UnitedLinux consortium) and Red
Flag — into its fold, where it hopes to crack what is shaping up to be one
of Linux’s strongest worldwide markets.
Spurred by the Chinese government’s strong endorsement of the platform,
Linux has been growing by leaps and bounds in the country. The Evans Data
“2002 Chinese Developer Survey, Vol. 2,” released last November, found that
65 percent of Chinese developers expected to write a Linux application this
year and 44 percent said they had already written at least one.
Additionally, the research found that intentions to use Linux as a primary
host operating system this year were expected to leap by 175 percent.
“The establishment of our alliance comes at no better time than this —
Linux is being adopted at a fast pace in China and enterprise-class
products are mature and ready,” said Liu Bo, president and chief executive
officer of Red Flag. “So it is a big milestone not only in the history of
Red Flag and Oracle, but also in the history of Linux development in
China.”
The alliance will provide customers of Red Flag’s Linux platform the
ability to deploy Oracle Unbreakable infrastructure with full technical
support from Oracle. Oracle said the two partners have already completed
certification of Oracle9i Database on Red Flag’s distribution, and are now
pursuing certification of the rest of Oracle’s product line on the new Red
Flag Data Center Linux operating system, including Oracle9i Application
Server, Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle E-business Suite.
The alliance also covers a joint support lab which the two partners —
under the aegis of Oracle Software Research and Development Center
(Beijing) Co. and Red Flag — plan to open in Beijing in “the near future.”
The support lab is intended to provide customers with “fast and integrated
engineering support,” and is expected to play a critical role in the two
partners’ product development, certification, R&D and support.
They have also identified their key target markets, which they said include
government, transportation, utility and energy. They said they are planning
sales and marketing campaigns to secure those markets, and have already
begun to recruit application providers to round out their offerings.
“The strategic partnership between Oracle and Red Flag for the China market
underscores Oracle’s strong commitment to helping China’s software industry
to grow,” said Andrew Hu, managing director of Oracle China. “The Chinese
government is encouraging organizations and enterprises to adopt Linux
because of its cost effectiveness and superior performance. Our goal is to
work with Red Flag and local application providers to come up with
world-class Linux products, applications and services that fit the needs of
customers in China.