The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat Inc would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14.
The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.
At the end of 2006, when Red Hat's top brass was discussing its fiscal third quarter results, Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chairman and chief executive officer, said that RHEL 5 would ship by February 28. And to be fair, Red Hat would have probably have liked to have been timed to market with SUSE 10's launch in late July last year.