LATEST INTELLIGENCE
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF RED HAT
SOLUTIONS AND COST RELATIONSHIP
TO UNPAID ALTERNATIVES
I
IDC OPINION
Open source software (OSS) has long held the
allure of being available for free use in the form of
community-supported projects, in addition to being
available in commercially packaged and supported
versions that are targeted at business users.
PRESENTED BY
That allure of free software has carried with it the
belief that by avoiding subscription fees, customers
can save money in the long term. Numerous IDC
Business Value research studies have found that
higher operational costs associated with self-
supporting community-based infrastructure software
far outstrips the cost of commercial subscription
support, when that software is used in a mission-
important or mission-critical capacity.
The opex associated with maintenance of
unsupported infrastructure software begins with the
need to maintain expertise on staff to stay close to the
project’s community; then to vet, qualify and apply
upstream fixes and patches to live systems, along with
upgrade activities from time to time to stay in synch
with the fast-moving upstream code base.
That fast churn leads to substantial testing and
validation costs for existing applications along with
verification of backward compatibility. Those opex
costs can quickly meet, and in most cases, exceed the
costs associated with a commercial distribution based
on that same community project.
This IDC Study takes a look at such a comparison
of several Red Hat products including Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (including Red Hat Satellite and
Red Hat Insights); Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat
OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible, with community-
based alternatives. The cost of deploying, managing
and life-cycling these products, both individually
and collectively, was considered in comparison to
community-based alternatives. n
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