Episode: 708
Title: HPR0708: Enterprise resource planning
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0708/hpr0708.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:16:31

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You.
Good day and welcome to this episode of Hacker Public Radio.
My name is JW and sometimes I do the JWP Linux and open source podcast but a couple of
times I've done the Hacker Public Radio and I thought I'd come back to y'all.
Then I normally just do topics here that I wouldn't normally do with the JWP Linux and
open source podcast but what I wanted to talk about was Linux and Enterprise space and
in particular Linux and ERP lately and what's been going on and specifically problems
that I've been seeing professionally and even a little bit privately as I move through
the internet online, the emergence of a third distribution inside of SAP is something
that's really, really major.
I think we all heard that Oracle was doing a copy that cat thing with Red Hat and I
mean they have every ride at GPL and if they want to sell their support cheaper than
Red Hat then they can rebrand and read the whole thing and it's completely fair.
But now they've added a new wrinkle to the mix more or less.
They added a support person at the SAP and now its Oracle Enterprise Linux is supported
to run SAP and then Oracle starts with all of their other enterprise products are slowly
being phased out from Red Hat.
So there may be a fork, I mean they may fork, the SAP said as much as they may fork in
the future.
But right now we're just talking real five, not real six because real six isn't supported
in production right now for SAP but the emergence of both vendors Red Hat and Novel struggle
with cluster and particularly the stretch cluster in the ERP space and by far in the enterprise
space the biggest database vendor in the ERP market for both Oracle apps, people soft
and SAP is Oracle with their database and so Oracle entering the market with and then having
extremely restrictive notes with products like their ASM and if you've read the SAP note
about using Zen or KVM with Oracle database it's pretty draconian and of course Oracle
KVM is in the near future or right now is going to be supported in the enterprise space.
So I mean it's going to be a really tough competition for especially Red Hat.
I mean Novel is a little more entrenched in the SAP space and then Red Hat basically
because SAP is a German company, its World Headquarters is in the Waldorf Germany and
the Suza was in Nuremberg and it's very close, it's very close, as a matter of fact 75%
of all Linux on SAP pre-configured solutions are what they call, appliance solutions are
done with Novel only so the HANA, the BIA, the E-search, the T-Rex, all of this is more
or less done only on Novel stack but you know the key thing has always been HA, you're
paying for ERP application and you've got five or six hundred workers working on it
and you're paying for HA, it's great that you're having two socket box and it's cheap
and you're going to run Novel and some of them you may have a support contract on
and some of them you may not have a support contract on but this is a real game changer
that Oracle comes into the game that was dominated by two, I want to say smaller Linux companies
and now Oracle is going to put its muscle there and you know I really think in the ERP space
that if I look down the street two or three more days years that I don't even see Red Hat
competing in the enterprise space anymore that with Oracle there and with such a large
percentage of customers running the Oracle database on Linux and the restrictive policies
that Oracle has with Red Hat to compete, yeah I really don't see it, I know that they had
a really great quarter and a BIA dollar quarter and everything but I mean from my view you know
working in the ERP field it's you know with Oracle's announcement and they're given a person
to SAP for the Linux development it really really is the nail and the coffin of especially Red Hat
you know Novel to have the preconfigured appliances that they can run on but even Novel has
problems with the cluster now there's several white papers from both companies about how to do
this or how to do that but I'm telling you you got your Oracle database and you know you're
talking to a customer and it's you know blah blah blah you know especially if you're looking at
you know deploying Solars or AIX or HPUX and trying to get that cluster and the five nons out of
that thing and so it's and then the amount of users you know that you can get on a Linux
up to your Linux solution I mean it's it's very very hard to scale that database you know without
Oracle so what are you going to use Max DB you're going to use you know you're going to go DB2
what exactly are you going to use to to do that right and I mean each thing has its cost but
the problem with Max DB is that there's not you know there's very few customers that have more than
5,000 users on Max DB right and you can be that and and then it's you have to have a shop that
knows about Max DB okay whereas you know every Indian company in the world that does support or
SI integration and of course the big house is a sensor captivity autos warge and all those you
know they have lots of Oracle people and so Max DB on Linux is not while a lot cheaper it's not
really the solution and we don't have very many people scaling you know the past a thousand users
really with that and it's very hard for references whereas Oracle you know you get the the whole
enterprise and with Oracle they really don't care if they get above a thousand users if there's a
difficulty well then they just sell a couple of spark blades and then and then that they're running
so large and any vendor HP or IBM will just just slip in a couple of blades of their other and
then they're you know easily scaling to 3,000 users with 5,000 so it's just a little update guys I
hope that you know it didn't bore y'all too much with the ERP and it's not very geeky or anything
so you'll have a great day and if y'all need me you can reach me at jwp5 at hotmail.com
thank you very much bye
thank you for listening to Hack the Public Radio
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