Oracle Linux: The Past, Present and Future Revealed

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Visit Oracle’s Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters and you’ll be surrounded by a sea of suits — sales professionals and customer support experts who deal with CIOs and corporate customers. But poke around and you’ll find the blue-jeans-wearing developers and engineers who design Oracle’s products. That’s where Coekaerts fits in.

Down to earth and soft-spoken, Coekaerts doesn’t own a suit but Oracle still puts him in front of customers because he talks their language: Scalability, reliability, security, performance.

Getting Started

Coekaerts arrived at Oracle Belgium in 1995, right out of school, before moving to California. He has never worked anywhere else. By the late 1990s, Ellison tapped Coekaerts to assist on the New Internet Computer, a Linux-based appliance that flopped and died.

But the Linux experiment wasn’t a waste of time. Oracle also began looking at Linux opportunities on the server — mainly to make sure Windows NT Server did not dominate the market. “It’s pretty well known we don’t like Microsoft,” said Coekaerts. “We didn’t want Windows to be the x86 server standard, and Larry [Ellison} knew x86 was going to be important. Larry rocks. We have a great leader.”

Oracle’s first big Linux move on the server came in 1998, when Oracle ported its database to Linux two weeks before Informix (now owned by IBM) made a similar move. “We heard what Informix was up to and we had to beat them,” recalls Coekaerts. “We did.”

Oracle’s first call more than a decade ago was to SUSE, but a relationship never materialized, said Coekaerts. The next call was to Red Hat. The goal was to make sure Oracle applications delivered screaming performance on Linux servers. Plus, Oracle wanted to map Unix’s best features over to Linux. And Oracle wanted Red Hat to address bugs and issues that potentially limited Oracle application performance on Linux.

Oracle and Red Hat began working together, but Coekaerts claims Red Hat didn’t hold up its end of the bargain. Hence, Oracle created Oracle Linux — not necessarily to compete with Red Hat, Coekaerts says. Instead, to give customers one throat to choke when it came to running Oracle applications, databases and middleware on Linux.

Coekaerts also attended kernel-oriented Linux events and asked for enterprise features to be built into Linux. “But Linus [Torvalds] would say ‘do it yourself.'”

Big Moves

Oracle ultimately responded with its own, Red Hat-compatible Linux (Oracle Linux) and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. While some pundits allege Oracle has been out to destroy Red Hat, Coekaerts said otherwise.

“Our customers need bugs fixed and Oracle’s software fully tested on Linux. That’s why we went and did Oracle Linux. Red Hat has zero Oracle [software] knowledge, whether it’s development, QA or support. They couldn’t help our customers. So we introduced Linux support to help our customers.”

So far, roughly 8,500 customers run Oracle Linux and/or the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, up from about 7,100 customers last year.

Inflection Points

Asked to pinpoint Oracle’s key milestones with Linux, Coekaerts pointed to:

Ironically, Coekaerts concedes that the Oracle-Sun deal briefly “put a damper” on Oracle’s Linux efforts. “Some customers worried we would drop SPARC Solaris. Others worried we would drop Linux. We didn’t take either of those steps.” Gradually, Coekaerts said, customers realized Oracle was committed to both operating systems (Solaris and Linux), and Oracle Linux deployments have continued to enjoy “good, double-digit growth rates,” he said.

Random Thoughts

During our conversation, Coekaerts touched on a range of additional topics — such as:

Admittedly, this blog entry doesn’t give equal time to many of the companies Coekaerts mentioned. But that’s the beauty of a blog like The VAR Guy — we’ll be back with continuing coverage of all the key players.

Final Thoughts

In the meantime, Coekaerts made an impression on The VAR Guy. Employees within big technology companies often filter their words or use slick marketing presentations when sitting down with the media. Coekaerts showed up to our meeting with no safety nets, no presentations — and no filters.

Refreshing.