Red Hat early on invested in understanding the needs of the different industry verticals they were trying to sell into and made sure their products could meet things such as compliance and audit requirements of differing sectors. They developed guides on how to deploy their products in a manner which met those requirements and their professional services engineers understood not just Red Hat products but the specific needs of differing sectors. This is how I saw them winning enterprise customers over larger established players in the early 2000s. Even today most opensource businesses don't do this to the extent Red Hat was in the early 2000s.
Moreover, I remember Red Hat sales reps back in the 2000s to be incredibly technical and knowledgable compared to every other vendor's sales reps. Every time I had a specific question regarding technical implementation or even compliance laws in my region, the sales rep knew the answer or forwarded me immediately to someone who did. They were very organized.
This is correct. They still do this. They are the only ones. They go beyond just "hey, I know of a database that could handle that size" to "why are you storing this here? this is PII, this is analytical data, this is business data, here's a proposal for doing this with open source at scale". It's not just "buy our product". They go above and beyond the needs of the product to the needs of the customer, like you said.
Other “open source” companies are always focused on modern startup stuff. Too much fake it till you make it.
They have a unique value proposition in that they are an OS, so they are everywhere by default. It makes sense to have a .gov, banking, healthcare, etc teams who grok whatever the issues are in those verticals.
