Oracle & Red hat go head on head ....Excerpts:

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used his keynote speech at the conference to unveil the new support offering for Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc.'s implementation of Linux. The "Unbreakable Linux" program provides support offerings that are similar to those offered for the Oracle middleware, applications and database products. The program will be priced from $99 per system per year.

Red Hat Inc. won't cut its prices for Linux support contracts to businesses, despite plans by Oracle Corp. to offer similar services at a steep discount. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik made the comments today to cable channel CNBC, one day after Red Hat's stock plunged following Oracle's announced plans to offer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and offer an Oracle-branded "clone" of RHEL.

"The IOUG is extremely excited by Oracle's announcement for enterprise-class support for Linux," Ari Kaplan, president of the Chicago-based Independent Oracle Users Group, said in a statement today. "This Oracle support for Linux encompasses the complete best-of-breed technology stack from the operating system to the database, Fusion Middleware, application server and applications."

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Prashanth Rai