Linux versus Linux
At an internal meeting in North America, Red Hat managers emphatically declared their support for a more intensive partnership with SAP. Whether this commitment was made under the influence of the planned takeover by IBM could not be verified. A complex system of relationships is now emerging:
IBM is not well disposed toward SAP because the ERP world leader is using Hana to push IBM's enterprise database DB2 out of the SAP community, but IBM has been very successful selling its Power servers for Hana.
However, these servers work on the basis of Suse Linux, which is currently still the better Linux derivative for Hana. But IBM has decided to take over Red Hat, so that SAP's existing customers can soon expect interesting combination offers from Power and Red Hat.
SAP's existing customers worldwide will have to choose Hana and at the same time choose IBM's well-known good service: Power Server plus Red Hat Linux. SAP closes its eyes and remains pragmatic - or buys Suse Linux, just as Red Hat was bought.
But there is still a way out: For SAP Hana, there will be Power plus Red Hat in the future, or Xeon plus Suse, because Intel will take over the weak-breasted Suse - or perhaps Microsoft will buy the European Suse.
The Windows company has stated that 40 percent of all MS Cloud Azure applications run on Linux. Those who know the history know that they are predominantly Suse Linux installations.
Microsoft is currently committed to Red Hat without reservation, but they will soon be operating under an IBM umbrella. One solution to the conflict: Red Hat Linux will become the preferred operating system on IBM's Power servers, and Suse Linux will become the preferred operating system in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
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2 comments
Peter M. Färbinger
Great! You are absolute right. But things are changing. Red Hat realized the mistakes from the past and is now working hard to get the things right with SAP Hana. We will see if the combination IBM and Red Hat can do e better job for the SAP Community like Suse.
EldonLab
US company John Deere was one of the first great Hana users, and later a SoH reference customer. Naturally, the CIO there used a Red Hat Linux distribution. The same mistake was made often in their own group as well. There was a massive exchange of opinions between our European group CCC manager and the hosts at the internal CCC meeting with our North- and South-American colleagues: Red Hat versus Suse!