Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle is a driving force behind Asianux with a 58.5% shareholding in Tokyo, Japan-based Miracle Linux and a joint development agreement with Beijing, China-based Red Flag. It also hosted the joint development of the Asianux operating system at its China Development Center in Beijing.
Oracle’s involvement in Asianux is an interesting strategy for the company and has enabled it to become a driving force behind and ensure its software is optimized for one of the key Linux distributions, without actually becoming a distributor itself.
Elevating Asianux to the global support program puts it on a par with Red Hat Inc and Novell Inc’s SuSE Linux, and puts Oracle in a good position to dominate the market for enterprise software on Linux in Asia.
Oracle has already certified its 10g product suite – including the Database, Application Server, Enterprise Manager and Oracle Collaboration Suite – for Asianux, which was released in April, and continues to offer Linux migration and support services through its China Development Center.
Other infrastructure vendors have also come forward to certify their products with Asianux, including Advanced Micro Devices, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, NEC, and Langchao.
Asianux is a standardized Linux platform on top of which Red Flag and Miracle add localized features under their respective brands. It is available from Red Flag with Red Flag Data Center OS 4.1 and Miracle Linux with Miracle Linux 3.0.
