The claim came during Oracle’s third fiscal quarter earnings announcement yesterday afternoon.
We’ve already signed a number of support contracts, some for over half a million dollars, and Oracle has replaced Red Hat at Yahoo and numerous other customer sites as their Linux support supplier, Ellison said.
Oracle got into the Linux business in October, when it announced it would take Red Hat’s open-source Linux code, clean it of Red Hat branding, and sell support for it at a much lower price.
Red Hat shrugged off the move, and despite getting a hard time on the stock market, it seemed to weather the storm in terms of revenue growth in its last-reported quarter.
Yahoo is the first major named customer to sign up to Oracle’s offer. It’s not clear how big a deal it is, whether or not it is company-wide, or whether it is one of the half-million-dollar contracts Ellison mentioned.
It’s early days, Ellison said. We’re not going to build our Linux business overnight, but we will build it.
