Red Hat Doesn’t See SUSE Linux as a Major Competitive Threat

Growth for Red Hat is coming at a time when the market remains competitive across multiple sectors. For enterprise workloads, Red Hat’s CEO sees it now as a battle between Linux and Microsoft Windows.

“As enterprises are looking to deploy new workloads, obviously, the choice is Windows or Linux now, and we believe we’re winning a lot larger share of those,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of our share take isn’t directly from somebody ripping out a Windows server to put it in a Linux server, it’s more, as applications sunset, they’re more likely to have been on UNIX or Windows and are now more likely to move to Linux.”

In the enterprise Linux space, SUSE Linux has long been Red Hat’s primary competitor, though Whitehurst isn’t too worried about them. According to Whitehurst, even in larger deals where there is some SAP implementation, he is not seeing SUSE all that much.

“We’re often in there trying to displace them and we’ve done a really nice job, I think, over the last couple of years of displacing SUSE,” Whitehurst said. But in terms of SUSE in deals, we so rarely see them now. That’s kind of not really a factor in Europe or anywhere in the world right now.”

Read the full story at Datamation:
Red Hat Grows Linux Revenues, Displacing Unix and SUSE

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.