Red Hat Exchange: Do Open Source App Stores Work?

An open source app store from a Linux vendor is a good idea, right?

As it turns out, Linux vendors selling their open source partners
solutions directly isn’t always a recipe for success. Just ask Red Hat, or
its rival Novell.

In 2007, Red Hat launched an effort called the Red Hat
Exchange (RHX), a marketplace for selling open source solutions from Red
Hat’s partners. RHX was in part Red Hat’s response to competitive
pressure from the Novell Market Start program.

Now in 2010, neither of those sales programs is still operational.

“When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but
we’ve learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is
challenging,” Mike Evans, Red Hat’s vice president of corporate development,
told InternetNews.com.”When you’ve got marketplaces that offer buyers
the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor
themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn’t a real efficient
marketplace.”

Evans noted that Red Hat put the Exchange out and quickly found out that
the ISV partners were getting the biggest value from the visibility they got
from being on the site. He added that ISV partners appreciated the publicity
aspect of the program, and the lead-generation aspects that followed.

“As we were working through [RHX], we started working with SYNNEX and the
Open Source Channel Alliance and it became clear in talking to ISV partners
[that] what they wanted was visibility into our user base and sales
channel,” Evans said.

Read the rest at Linux Planet.

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