Comprehensive, Open-Source E-Commerce Suite
By Charlie Cho
Red Hat is best known for its Linux distribution, to the point where it's sometimes mistaken for Linux itself (newbie to mailing list: "I'm running Linux 7.0"). Red Hat's early lead in developing a Linux OS that's easy to install and use resulted in the first high-profile IPO for a Linux company. As a public company, Red Hat is painfully aware of the limited revenue opportunities in developing and selling a Linux distribution. No matter how popular it is, any company with a product that can be legally installed an unlimited number of times, freely copied, and resold by others is going to have a hard time making its shareholders happy. Red Hat's strategy is to become more vertically integrated by bundling and selling applications that run on top of its Linux OS and by offering a range of support, development, consulting, and training services. The goal is to make money by managing and streamlining the complexity of an application and offering a single source of accountability for the customer. Earlier integrated products consisted of third-party proprietary server applications bundled with Red Hat Linux. Red Hat E-Commerce Suite is Red Hat's most ambitious product to date in this vein.
The product targets the small- to medium-size business market. Companies in this market need a robust, extensible, ready-to-run, B2B or B2C solution. However, it must be one without the cost and complexity associated with high end systems.
