Red Hat is certainly making an impact with its Linux server products, but could it be doing even better? Yes, say Dell, but if they lowered their prices. Dell, who have a partnership with the Linux seller, say that Red Hat needs to lower its prices, or risk losing customers to free versions of the open-source operating system. Indeed, pricing seems to have been the top factor which influenced Dell to sign its October pact to sell Novell's SuSE Linux, as Novell has been able to offer what Dell sees as more reasonable prices for its OS. Red Hat, it seems, is still just too pricey.
"We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers." - Judy Chavis, director of business development for Dell's enterprise product group.
The problem for Red Hat is that a lot of the technology that they offer is available for free, minus the extra support, software updates and certification that Red Hat provides. Customers may choose to forgo these things if it means that they can get the same kind of server OS for free.