As large businesses try to find their way through the cloud, Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is pitching its OpenStack Platform as a better way to make the transition and manage their operations in the new environment.
The Raleigh-based open source software company is already seeing more enterprises transitioning their data centers to the cloud. As they do so, Red Hat is angling to claim a greater stake of that work through its OpenStack Platform. Speaking from the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, Red Hat announced beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0.
“OpenStack is the next evolution for cloud computing, cloud infrastructure,” Bryan Che, Red Hat general manager said on a conference call from the summit.
Che said Red Hat’s offerings address and simplify the challenges for enterprises as they adopt cloud computing. Red Hat’s technologies will work with Red Hat software as well as offerings from third parties, including VMware and Amazon.
The top concerns of businesses moving into the cloud involve the challenges of building and operating in the cloud environment, Che said, citing findings from research firm Gartner. In a recently released report previewing data center and desktop modernization in 2014, Gartner said organizations will face more pressure to increase service availability and also improve efficiency. Greater adoption of cloud computing for data centers and desktops “will dominate 2014 data center planning and operations.” Gartner expects that OpenStack will be a big part of those changes.
“OpenStack-based cloud management solutions are increasingly viewed by Gartner clients as a means to mitigate risk of lock-in and expand vendor choice in private and hybrid cloud deployments,” Gartner said in the report.
Red Hat on Tuesday also announced the availability of the next release of its cloud management platform CloudForms 3.0.
Che said that the new offering adds new capabilities for enterprise customers to build and manage clouds. This latest CloudForms release adds capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform along with enhanced capabilities to manage Amazon Web Services.
OpenStack-related business revenue is projected to top $1 billion by 2015, according to a recent report from 451 Research. Red Hat is working to grab more share of that business through its partner network.
Red Hat unveiled its Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform in June. Mike Werner, Red Hat’s senior director, Global EcoSystems, said that since then the OpenStack Partner Network has grown 30 percent. The company claims its partner network is the world’s largest ecosystem for OpenStack deployments.
Red Hat added a new partner, announcing Tuesday a collaboration with French open source cloud computing company eNovance. The companies are already well acquainted; eNovance was among the top 10 contributors to the OpenStack project. Through the partnership, the companies say they will work together to deliver and manage OpenStack services to their joint customers. No financial details of that collaboration were disclosed.
