In what could be a significant driver for growth, Red Hat is expanding its reach into China with a partnership deal that puts its Linux products on the cloud marketplace of ecommerce giant Alibaba.

Alibaba’s cloud offering has been showing rapid growth.

“In August, Alibaba announced its cloud business crossed 1M paying customers and brought in $359M for the quarter,” reports financial news website SeekingAlpha.

“Alibaba Cloud intends to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a pay-as-you-go model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace,” the companies said Thursday.

ZDNet sees potential for Raleigh-based Red Hat in the deal.

“The partnership would offer Red Hat access to a sizeable potential clientele in China, where Alibaba was the largest public cloud provider and customers included CITIC Group, China Huaneng Group, and PICC Finance,” the tech news site notes.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Red Hat shares did move up almost 1 percent on the news.

“As enterprises in China, and throughout the world, look to modernize application environments, a full-lifecycle solution by Red Hat on Alibaba Cloud can provide customers higher flexibility and agility,” said Yeming Wang, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global at Alibaba Cloud.

“We look forward to working with Red Hat to help enterprise customers with their journey of scaling workloads to Alibaba Cloud.”

As part of the deal, Alibaba has joined Red Hat’s Certified Cloud and Service Provider program and also says Red Hat customers can move accounts to its cloud.

“Our customers not only want greater performance, flexibility, security and portability for their cloud initiatives; they also want the freedom of choice for their heterogeneous infrastructures,” said Mike Ferris, vice president of Technical Business Development and Business Architecture at Red Hat.

“They want to be able to deploy their technologies of choice on their scalable infrastructure of choice. That is Red Hat’s vision and the focus of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program. By working with Alibaba Cloud, we’re helping to bring more choice and flexibility to customers as they deploy Red Hat’s open source solutions across their cloud environments.”

  • VIDEO: Watch an overview of Alibaba’s cloud offering at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDWeomDwH1Q