Who is expanding the market, and what are some ways IT pros can successfully vet them?
Raven Zachary: It is true that there is increased vendor competition — the number of vendors that are competing in the open source stack provider market is growing. This is the real challenge for end users. Competition, while a benefit for users, can also make it challenging for them, especially if their organization is new to open source software and they are trying to evaluate the reliability. It is not as simple any more as it was a year or two ago, when it was pretty clear where to get product-level support. Now you have operating system vendors like Novell, Red Hat and Sun competing for business as they perceive stacks as an extension of the operating system. Applications companies that are starting to bundle everything from hardware to the stack to applications oftentimes support the whole set to the customer. And then there are the systems integrators, which see the stack as a building block for customized development initiatives. Where is the customer to go? It all depends on
