Red Hat's Volley on Linux Management Offering

A recent article on InternetNews.com points to some moves by Red Hat that could have a large impact on Open Source in the Enterprise. From the article:
The leading Linux distributor told internetnews.com that it is rolling out online monitoring tool this year Red Hat customers.
Rich Friedman, director of product management for the Red Hat Network, told internetnews.com the management tool is already in use with a select group of customers with expanded rollouts planned throughout the year.
“We provide a set of services that can monitor systems and we handle the background work of collecting metrics, analyzing them, sending out availability and performance alerts,” Friedman said. “We provide reporting charting and history and even more capabilities in terms of managing how you set up alerts and it's all from an online perspective.”
“What we'll be doing with RHN 5 is providing support and capabilities around virtualization management,” Friedman said. [This includes] “focusing on what we do from a Red Hat RHEL perspective and the capabilities we have and the ability to control the system from a central place.”
Red Hat is taking a different angle than a one-console approach to managing all the enterprise components. “One console to serve all purposes is not as important as managing RHEL with the best capabilities,” Friedman said. “That's where we focus.”
And it's not just Oracle with which Red Hat wants to contrast its approach. Freidman said Red Hat's goal is to integrate with the big systems management vendors and work with them in a complementary manner.
Though Red Hat's goal is not be like the big systems management vendors, it is pursuing an effort to open up RHN so that it can manage more applications.
By opening up the infrastructure like this they will be allowing other companies to use it as a framework to build all kinds of compelling applications that can be brought to market much faster and for much lower costs. All the while they'll be cementing themselves as a core piece of the puzzle. This sums it up nicely:
Friedman explained that Red Hat is currently working on a platform for systems management that open source projects will be able to leverage to provide systems management out of the box. “Not to be an OpenView (HP's enterprise management product) or any one else in that arena but really as a way that you can integrate a base platform, and then provide a plug-in that will mange your product set,” Friedman said.
It's that kind of focus along with an understanding of their market and core strengths that allows Red Hat to do so well. I for one hope they are able to continue to execute as they have been. With moves like this, you have to think they well. Well done.
–jeremy