On the exhibit hall floor, Anirban Chatterjee, IBM IT Specialist in the Executive Briefing Centers Systems and Technology Group, demonstrated how the tool works along with the PowerVM Live Partitioning Mobility feature.

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Jarman also touched on the fact that IBM offers full support for SUSE 11, a move we have reported previously, with a focus on the cloud computing emphasis.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the Linux on Power activities at IBM throughout the show, and we’ll be following up with some end users who are willing to share their experiences. If you have any questions you want to ask IBM about Linux on POWER, leave a note in the comments below and I’ll work on getting you an answer.

But things start to get interesting at point number six in his list, and I honestly would have missed this if I hadn’t seen the comments of The VAR Guy, who stated “Red Hat is destroying the old myth that there’s no money in open source.”

The VAR Guy’s declaration was based on Whitehurst’s statement with this information about the success of the company:

Weathering the economic storm. Red Hat has continued to execute well in what is a pretty competitive economic climate. In fiscal year 2008, Red Hat became the first open source vendor to cross the $500 million mark in revenues and we’ve also maintained 27 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in total revenue.

Impressive. Or is it? The VAR Guy points out that Microsoft earned 120 times as much during the same year.

Red Hat may be leading in the Linux distribution race thus far, but Novell is charging ahead, on the cusp of releasing SUSE 11, with greater virtualization and interoperability promised. With Novell’s partnership with Microsoft, the company is making gains in the market.

As businesses try to bounce back from the downturn in the economy, open source may be an even more attractive alternative. What do you think? Is Red Hat’s $500 million a true achievement, or is it just an attempt to give credence to open source? Share your thoughts.