With the announcement that Red Hat and Oracle have completed certification of Oracle 10g Release 2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, it seems like a good time to look at how Independent Software Vendor (ISV) certifications are coming along in general.

Perhaps the most important factor in the success of Red Hat’s open source solutions has been their adoption by the ISV community as cost-effective, secure and stable platforms on which to deploy their own products. Red Hat’s ecosystem of certified applications is by far the largest in the open source market, and its size creates a powerful halo effect, attracting new ISVs who are looking to support Linux. To date nearly 3,000 applications have been certified on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and JBoss product families.

Of course, ISVs recertify their applications with any major new operating system release to ensure that their applications continue to work correctly. As a result, in the early days of a new release, the number of certified applications is far fewer than that for the previous, well-established release.

The good news is that the comprehensive server and storage virtualization, excellent performance and unmatched security capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are making it a highly attractive platform for ISVs. And, responding to customer demand, they are rapidly certifying their applications on it.

At initial product release, over 80 applications were certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Today, after four months of product availability, nearly 400 applications are now certified. And many more are currently undergoing certification and will soon be available.

Applications available today for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 cover many different markets from leading vendors including BEA, EMC, Ingres, Opsware, Oracle, Platform Computing, SAP, Sybase, Symantec and VMware.

For those of you who want the full scoop on the Oracle certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, here are the details: certification covers Oracle 10g Release 2, both single instance and RAC (Real Application Clusters) configurations, on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and x86-64 systems. Certification means that Oracle customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3 and 4 can now transition safely to version 5 in a fully supported manner.

For a full list of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications, please visit here.

For more information on Oracle certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 please visit here.