Monday, November 13, 2006

Calls of Note Part 5

- UBS notes that earlier last week they attended the Red Hat (NASDAQ:RHAT) Government Users Conference in Washington, D.C. The firm talked with a number of Red Hat customers and partners to gauge sentiment on the Linux market. From a reseller perspective, conversations suggested that the jury is still out regarding the impact that ORCL's announcement could have on pricing.

Much to their surprise, the majority of customers (as opposed to resellers) the firm spoke with were not aware of Oracle's recent announcement to provide its own support for RHEL. While that in and of itself is better than what they expected going into this event, the firm notes that it might be difficult to draw conclusions from this one vertical on how sales cycles this quarter might be impacted.

Customers are eagerly anticipating RHEL 5 because on the integration of Xen virtualization. They are confident in the disaster recovery and fault error containment offered by Xen, and they are motivated to implement virtualization to reduce costs on hardware and utilities, and to free up server room space.

Maintains Neutral and $16 tgt.

Notablecalls: As expected, RHAT bounced following the ORCL announcement. Following the bounce I think UBS' comments are not actionable anymore. Good to know category for the RHAT fans.

No comments: