HP Gearing Up to Resell Oracle Linux

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Turns out Oracle CEO Larry Ellison does have a few friends and one of them
is HP.

Earlier this week Ellison claimed that Oracle had displaced Red Hat at
search engine giant Yahoo. But neither Yahoo nor Red Hat completely agree with Ellison’s claim.

Ellison also said Oracle had signed HP, CDW and Dell as resellers
for Oracle’s Enterprise Linux (OEL). Oracle entered the Linux support business last fall when Ellison announced he would be undercutting Red Hat by offering direct Oracle support.

Turns out, Ellison was a little off on his reseller claims, though not
by much.

Dell has not responded to request for comment from
internetnews.com, but HP has. From what Doug
Small, worldwide director of R&D of HP’s Open Source & Linux Organization wrote in an e-mail sent to internetnews.com, it looks like Ellison might have been just a little ahead of himself.

“HP and Oracle are in discussions about partnering and supporting OEL. Meanwhile, HP is testing Oracle
Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers, as well as HP
StorageWorks products.”

Small declined to speculate on the potential business potential that OEL might represent for HP, though he noted that his company feels
confident enough to invest in testing its products with OEL.

Additionally Small commented that HP has received requests from customers to
support OEL.

Unlike its competitors at IBM and Dell, HP already supports three Linux
distributions for enterprise deployment with support for Red Hat, Novell and
Debian. IBM and Dell today are only supporting Red Hat and Novell. HP’s
support for Debian is also paying off so far with indirect revenues in the tens of millions.

HP has said in the past that it would only pick up additional distributions if there was the opportunity to generate sales since each additional distribution requires an investment in testing and support.

Though HP will soon be supporting four different Linux distributions, it will
not necessarily be pushing one over the other.

“It is up to Oracle and Red Hat to differentiate their product to
customers,” Small said. “HP is in a position to provide the appropriate
levels of support to customers using our servers and storage whether they
choose Debian, Novell, Oracle or Red Hat.”

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