As per one of the Red Hat officials, "Anyone finding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions a tough sell for management used to Microsoft’s one-time license fee for Windows must emphasize that there are more factors to be considered, chiefly return on investment." One attendee raised this issue during a question-and-answer session between high-ranking Red Hat officials and the audience at the Red Hat Summit 2009 conference in Chicago. According him, it was difficult to persuade decision-makers to move away from Windows and buy Red Hat’s Linux. They are sold on Microsoft’s one-time acquisition fee and security updates, he said. "With the subscription model for RHEL, you have to keep paying.
Attendee added,"Technically, Linux is more stable and better than Windows but management looks at the duel from a different perspective. Red Hat officials stressed return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership. "We have many, many, much data and many models to prove that what we have is a better investment over time," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president and president for products and technologies.
In reply to this issue, Katrinka McCallum, vice president for the management solutions business unit at Red Hat said,"Red Hat Linux can save on personnel costs pertaining to IT management.Users are able to do a lot more with some of the management tools. Buyers must consider hard dollars, business value, reliability, and people costs."From a total cost of ownership (TCO) perpsective, Red Hat comes out ahead every time, claimed Marco Bill-Peter, vice president of the Red Hat support group.
Mark Little, Red Hat’s vice president of engineering for middleware finally added,"The whole effort is about improving our out-of-the-box experience, making it easier to manage everything we do, such as configuration and runtime management.Our target audience has changed a lot.It’s not just cutting edge developers anymore."
