Red Hat and SUSE are shifting their old Linux battle to a new market: Big Data. Both open source companies made major Big Data statements this week, but they are attacking the market using completely different strategies. Here’s what channel partners need to know.
Let’s start with SUSE. The company today announced “new partners and a portfolio of integrated products designed to help customers get the most value and performance from their big data solutions.” Key SUSE partners mentioned include:
- Teradata, which delivers its entire portfolio of solutions exclusively on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
- SAP HANA, which runs atop SUSE.
- In the HADOOP market, SUSE is partnering with Cloudera, Hortonworks and WANdisco.
Read between the lines and SUSE is partnering on all fronts to make sure its Linux platform is the underlying architecture from Big Data systems.
Here Comes Red Hat
Red Hat is coming at the market from a different angle. The company’s Big Data push is all about Red Hat Storage.
Red Hat’s big idea: Have all data reside in a general enterprise storage pool, and make the data accessible to many enterprise workloads. The company describes the strategy in this blog post.
Big Data Party, Big Data Profits?
Most of the major IT industry vendors — IBM, Oracle, HP, etc. — are pushing Big Data solutions very aggressively to their channel partners. The VAR Guy Contributing Blogger Elliot Markowitz recently noted the Big Data opportunity.
Still, The VAR Guy has a confession: He thinks Big Data will generate big profits for channel partners that truly understand analytics, social media monitoring, and unstructured data management. But our resident blogger also thinks the vast majority of VARs won’t quite master Big Data. Though Red Hat and SUSE would love to change that.
