You already know IBM is pursuing Sun Microsystems' customer base. But here's a twist: Red Hat and its channel partners seem to be helping IBM pursue Sun's customers.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT - News), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat's operations in Japan has been named the number one vendor that customers intend to conduct business with in the future by Nikkei Market Access' "Industry Trends in Intended Use of Products/Services of Major Vendors" study.

SCO CEO Darl McBride has sent a letter to partners and customers about the ruling in SCO v. Novell and its impact on SCO as a company. We get the clearest hint yet of what SCO may be thinking for the future, and as I expected, there is no white flag flying yet.

Oracle OpenWorld -- a major event for Oracle partners and customers -- kicks off October 11 in San Francisco. Sun Microsystems will be in the house. So will Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. And if you look hard enough, there will even be some MySQL content at the event. Here’s the scoop.

I'm sure you could write it yourself, knowing SCO as we do by now, but SCO's Jeff Hunsaker has sent a letter to "SCO Customers and Partners", letting them know that SCO will be filing an appeal shortly. From the wording, I'd say they intend to appeal both rulings, the August 10th and the July 16th rulings.

Novell Inc.'s latest pitch to lure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers to migrate to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise appears to be a tough sell.

IBM, which is seeing a continued resurgence in the mainframe space, is offering new migration services and financial incentives in hopes of luring away some HP and Sun Unix customers

Microsoft's handling of the Windows Update controversy is a good case study for how the company's public relations efforts work. The lessons are important for Microsoft customers and partners.

I have come up with the analogy and strategy of Red vs. Green as a way of helping partners, customers and the casual passerby understand that depending on which Novell/SUSE products they have, they will likely benefit most from a particular set of products and growth options.