RALEIGH – Red Hat and its corporate parent IBM today announced the availability of Red Hat Marketplace, a one-stop-shop to find, try, buy, deploy and manage enterprise applications across an organization’s hybrid IT infrastructure, including on-premises and multicloud environments.

Red Hat’s Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of Red Hat’s cloud services business unit, called the marketplace “the next step in the hybrid cloud.”

“As companies digitize their business, they must be more agile and faster to market. They must embrace and use the cloud to do this,” he said in a webinar announcing the new cloud play.

The rapidly growing cloud market and Red Hat’s prominence in developing cloud solutions was the primary driver of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of the Raleigh-based company in a deal that closed in July 19.

IBM, however, facces daunting competition for cloud business from market leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google.

Red Hat and IBM – both employing thousands of people across the state, primarily in the Triangle – are betting the Marketplace approach will help make it more competitive.

Red Hat Marketplace and Red Hat Marketplace Select, operated by IBM, deliver an ecosystem of software from a range of independent software vendors (ISVs) built on Red Hat OpenShif. Red Hat OpenShift allows for the portability of mission-critical workloads across secured hybrid cloud environments with certified enterprise software that can help companies avoid vendor lock-in.

“This is not about looking at the cloud as a single technology or lace, It’s all about hybrid and using the best tools and services in the marketplace,” Muzilla said.

Sandesh Bhat, IBM.
                                                                                Copyright Capitol Broadcasting, ARR.

Growing number of software vendors embrace the marketplace

Sandesh Bhat, IBM General Manager, Open Cloud Technology & Applications said, “In today’s business climate, companies want flexibility to build, manage, and deploy applications to the infrastructure of their choice, and have a seamless experience with their on-premises environments. Enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Marketplace makes this possible in a simple, efficient, and scalable platform.”

A growing ecosystem of ISVs has embraced the marketplace because it offers an efficient, vendor-neutral, data-driven channel for selling and supporting products in enterprise accounts.

The growing list of more than 50 commercial products available for purchase includes leading solutions across 12 different categories—including AI/ML, Database, Monitoring, Security, Storage, Big Data, Developer tools, and more—from ISVs such as Anchore, Cockroach Labs, CognitiveScale, Couchbase, Dynatrace, KubeMQ, MemSQL, MongoDB, and StorageOS.

All products are certified for Red Hat OpenShift and offered with commercial support. Built on the open Kubernetes Operator Framework, they can run on OpenShift like a cloud service, with capabilities like automated install and upgrade, backup, failover and recovery.

The private version—Red Hat Marketplace Select—allows clients to not only provide their teams with easy access to curated, pre-approved software, but also to track usage and spending by departments of all the software deployed across hybrid cloud environments.

Lars Herrmann, senior director, Technology Partnerships, Red Hat, said, ““We believe that removing the operational barriers to deploy and manage new tools and technologies can help organizations become more agile in hybrid multicloud environments.”

Lars Hermann, Red Hat. Copyright Capitol Broadcasting, ARR.

He added, “The software available on Red Hat Marketplace is tested, certified and supported on Red Hat OpenShift to enable built-in management logic and streamline implementation processes. It doesn’t stop at install but guides the user through the value. This helps customers run faster with automated deployments while enjoying the improved scalability, security, and orchestration.

With automated deployment, Red Hat Marketplace makes software instantly available for deployment on any Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Software programs available through Red Hat Marketplace can be deployed across the open hybrid cloud and operate in any environment with minimal set-up and overhead, making management at scale easy.

Some of the software is offered on a subscription basis, others on demand.

The Webinar also featured customer endorsements .

Alan Chhabra, senior vice president, Partners & APAC Sales, MongoDB, said, “We have millions of developers using our products to deploy to the cloud and modernize their applications. We are always looking to reduce complexities so we can serve them better. Red Hat Marketplace supports the shift we’re seeing to Kubernetes, workload portability, and a cloud-first approach. It allows us to expand our reach to Red Hat OpenShift users and gives them ways to make hybrid cloud management easier.”

Alan chhabra, senior vp, partner, MongoDB. Copyright Capitol Broadcasting. ARR

Rajeev Ronanki, senior vice president and chief data officer, Anthem, said, “We are committed to ushering in a new era of healthcare that profoundly enhances and simplifies our customers’ healthcare experience, and having our own Red Hat Marketplace Select environment will play an important role in our digital-first strategy.

Key elements of the marketplace include:

  • Developers can find popular software across a wide range of categories, including AI, database, monitoring, networking, storage, security and more.
  • With purchases readily accessible on Red Hat OpenShift consoles—in familiar tiles—and continuous 24/7/365 support, developers can have new software up and running smoothly when they need it.
  • Software is certified for Red Hat OpenShift and built with Kubernetes Operators for built-in management logic, including seamless upgrades and patches, backup and recovery, log processing, scaling and more.
  • Metering is enabled for all software purchased through the marketplace, providing granular visibility into actual usage and spending patterns, helping to minimize waste and address financial risks associated with end-of-year software audits customers will also now have greater choice of pricing models.