Red Hat's Exchange roars like a muted lamb

"So, again, in terms of traffic, it's not yet on par with Sourceforge and other avenues for us," Asay said. "But it has been surprisingly fruitful given the number of downloads and trials we've had through it. If we had this same ratio of download to trial to conversion on Sourceforge, we'd be IPO'ing tomorrow."

VMware's Technology Network (VMTN) joins Sourceforge as another developer destination far more powerful than RHX, according to those interviewed for this story, who also complained about the lack of traffic generated by Red Hat's software house.

It's big, red baby

It's crucial to note that RHX remains in its infancy.

"The evaluation period for these applications is typically sixty days and in some cases more," Mattox reminded us. "We anticipate some of the reviews from trials that are underway to come in over the next few weeks."

Red Hat is also looking into possible changes around the RHX review mechanism. Customers could find a deeper review system more fruitful where they could comment on, say, how easy a package is to install or the quality of a GUI rather than broadly describing the entire ISV experience in one go.

A bit of innovation could go a long way toward making RHX more compelling for customers. At the moment, the entire RHX site feels rather clinical and certainly fails to inspire.

The software maker could also, as we see it, use some more channel and hardware vendor backing, and Mattox tells us such efforts are underway.

We remain bullish about Red Hat's long-term prospects with RHX. Lord knows the open source crowd could use some organization around the myriad applications that have forced their way into data centers. The project, however, does seem a bit risky for the ISVs in that Red Hat could end up owning the direct line to their customers and would dominate the main open source software marketplace.

It will take a heck of a lot of effort on Red Hat's part to reach such a state. In the meantime, collectives such as VMTN, Sourceforge and SpikeSource seem more than capable of keeping Red Hat honest. ®