Red Hat turns to virtualisation for customer cost savings

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 1 Nov 2005 at 17:25

Every silver lining has a cloud. And in the case of virtualisation, it's the licensing agreements with application vendors. Most of these enterprise-level apps are licensed per processor. When virtualisation means that the number of instances of an application are limited to overall computing power rather than the physical number of processors, the software makers are going to want a licence for each software image running.

Red Hat's Timothy Yeaton, Senior VP, Marketing, said he expects a customer revolt to settle the issue. With the major platform vendors working on virtualisation, the technology is literally on the doorstep. And the big companies such as financial houses which are likely to be the first adopters of virtualisation will demand that the software vendors change their licensing models to something more reasonable.