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By Sandeep Junnarkar, 17 March 2003 09:13

NEWS Database heavyweight Oracle has announced it is to provide technical support to customers who are using open-source software from UnitedLinux, a consortium of second-tier Linux companies. Oracle said it plans to work with UnitedLinux to identify technical-support problems and streamline the process of addressing those issues. It will service customers who have a support contract for Oracle products and who maintain an operating system support contract with any of the UnitedLinux members. The move is likely to be seen in some quarters as a blow to Red Hat Linux. UnitedLinux is a four-company consortium made up of SuSE, the SCO Group, Turbolinux and Conectiva, which teamed up to present a single front against Red Hat's dominance in the industry. Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk, said: "From the introduction of its developers' toolkit to the latest announcement for Oracle support, UnitedLinux is becoming more of an enterprise-ready platform, and as such certainly does represent a clear and present danger to Red Hat." The companies said that corporate customers will benefit from the joint engineering efforts as Oracle and UnitedLinux collaborate to integrate required fixes and patches in future maintenance releases of UnitedLinux. Under the partnership announced at the CeBit trade show in Germany, Oracle will provide "level 3" support for its customers - the deepest level, meaning that it takes responsibility for the entire software package and doesn't have to refer any calls to Linux partners, said Dave Dargo, vice president of Oracle's Linux Program Office. Working with Linux has been a change of pace for Oracle, which typically has been beholden to other companies for modifications to operating systems. Linux's open-source nature means Oracle programmers can get involved and the database giant can also become more of an operating system company. Dargo said hiring engineers to work on Linux "was a necessary evil that turned into a perk for us." Other software vendors such as BEA Systems, BMC Software and Veritas Software are also increasingly certifying that their products work with various versions of Linux. Even Sun Microsystems, which was trying to push its own version of Linux, may be instead reconsidering that strategy and entering into an alliance with Red Hat and SuSE. IBM and Hewlett-Packard also have seen the benefit of striking alliances when it comes to Linux.