Friday 10 September 2010
Red Hat was the first supported operating system and JBoss the first supported middleware on AWS. Anyway, Red Hat has thought up this shiny new program to certify “industry leaders in cloud computing” on Red Hat solutions. Premier Cloud Provider Partners are supposed to collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing, and business models.
Red Hat says customer interest in cloud computing, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications to the cloud, is increasing and that they’re asking to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments.
Red Hat has launched a new partner program to make sure its enterprise Linux and JBoss software are core components of a cloud-computing infrastructure, and to guarantee that Red Hat-based applications will run reliably and safely in the cloud.
The new Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program unveiled this week certifies cloud-computing providers to offer applications and infrastructure based on Red Hat software, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and JBoss Java middleware, according to Red Hat.
Different Red Hat customers have different interests and needs when it comes to the cloud, he said. Enterprise customers want to know that their applications that run on Red Hat in their own data centers will run safely and reliably in the cloud, while ISVs want to ensure that the applications they’ve built can be extended to the cloud without too much hassle, Evans said
Although Red Hat unveiled the new program this week, it won’t reveal the specific requirements of the program until August, when it also will reveal other partners, he added.
The list of cloud-computing providers is still being decided, so the move for businesses to take their applications to the cloud is still in the early stages of adoption. While the recession has slowed the move to cloud computing, analysts expect the market for cloud-based IT services will continue to grow. Research firm IDC predicts that spending on cloud-based IT services will reach US$42 billion by 2012 and account for 25 percent of IT spending growth that year.
Currently, there are a handful of large companies in the cloud-computing market — Google, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM, Salesforce.com and Microsoft among them — but he anticipates there eventually will be 50 to 100 cloud-computing providers when all is said and done.
Through the program, Red Hat will work with cloud-computing infrastructure providers to technically enable customers to move RHEL and JBoss subscriptions from their in-house environments to the cloud, Evans said. The company also will help technically enable by-the-hour, pay-as-you-go versions of RHEL and JBoss, and provide joint technical support with the cloud-computing provider. Red Hat wants to ensure customers will get the same level of support from Red Hat after moving applications to the cloud that they do before the move, Evans said. Red Hat also will plan coordinated marketing and sales efforts with its Premier Cloud Provider Partners, he added.
