9 May 2008

Red Hat Linux workshop

Today Fiza and I went to a Red Hat Linux workshop organized by ECS (a major IT vendor) in Kelana Jaya. It was not really a workshop, more like a briefing session on how to be a Red Hat Linux distributor/reseller.
We were the first to arrive there at the ECS training room, 3 minutes from time. Out of the 12 confirmed attendees, only half showed up. Elvin (pic above) basically explained stuff about Red Hat, the products and how to be a vendor. To be honest, I find his explanation a little bit hard to comprehend. No disrespect to him but he did sound like an insurance agent/VCD paddler to me.

Furthermore, I've never heard of some of the products that he mentioned. Maybe that's my fault for not doing some reading on Red Hat beforehand but as the organizer he should have find out his target audience. I bet the Microsoft guy next to me didn't understand a thing what he said.
Some more, since he's promoting Red Hat Linux, the least he could do is actually use the product himself. Instead, he uses regular Windows XP and Microsoft Office for his presentation, things that he could very well do with Linux and OpenOffice.org. Now I'm not sure whether he uses Linux at all. Not very convincing if you ask me.

The product he's trying to sell us is Red Hat Linux Enterprise edition which is aimed at client/server system and web applications. The only advantage Red Hat have over free Linux distros such as Ubuntu or Debian are certification from major software makers (such as Oracle & Sun) and 24/7 Premium technical support.

In my opinion, I don't think our clients are ready to adopt Red Hat or any other Linux systems yet in their organizations. Although we're capable of implementing and providing support for them, they are likely required to hire a Linux technology specialist to oversee and maintain the system if they're really serious about this. While there's endless supply of Windows/Cisco experts out there, Linux experts are still hard to come by in this country.

Nevertheless, I think this workshop was not a complete waste of time cause we did get a free mini torch light and a Red Hat t-shirt each he he!