May 4, 2011 -- Red Hat introduced OpenShift, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for developers who build on open source. Red Hat OpenShift redefines the PaaS market by providing a new level of choice in languages, frameworks, and clouds for developers to build, test, run, and manage their applications. Building on Red Hat’s extensive JBoss expertise, OpenShift leads the PaaS market with innovative features, including CDI, and plans to support Java EE 6, extending the capabilities of PaaS to richer and more demanding applications. Building on Red Hat’s open source leadership, OpenShift is designed to end the lock-in of PaaS, allowing users to choose the cloud provider upon which their application will run.
• Current Perspective: Positive on Red Hat's announcement of two new cloud services focused on private (IaaS) and public (PaaS) cloud application platform deployments, because although its PaaS has been a long time coming, Red Hat can potentially leap ahead of the pack based on its intent to offer a full portfolio of best-of-breed middleware as a PaaS-based offering.
• Vendor Importance: High to Red Hat, because its open source business model plays well into the company's ability to offer cloud services with broad language and framework support, through a variety of cloud service providers, enabled by the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard. The company is providing its nine-million-strong developer community with a choice in form factors, and it is more likely to displace competitors by offering users broader deployment options. Now, the pressure is on to deliver on promised services-on-demand while continuing to innovate and provide new releases of its core technology (including the JBoss platforms), rally cloud service provider partnerships, and build up its support infrastructure under the new cloud division.
• Market Impact: Moderate on the application platforms market segment, because while the potential is great to leapfrog competitors in this space, Red Hat is only making available the free service portion (called Express) of its PaaS initially, and it could take up to two years to deliver all of the JBoss platform solutions through PaaS. Red Hat can claim to have an early lead among most players in this space, but it likely will not be for long. That said, its PaaS/IaaS offering could have a strong impact on primary competitor VMware, which lacks a complete middleware portfolio to accompany its cloud services.
Red Hat Delivers the Platform-as-a-Service Cloud for Open Source Developers
Industry's broadest Platform-as-a-Service to Support JBoss, Java EE, CDI and other programming models; Offers choice of cloud providers, frameworks and languages
Raleigh, NC - May 4, 2011 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT).
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced OpenShift, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developers who build on open source. Red Hat OpenShift redefines the PaaS market by providing a new level of choice in languages, frameworks and clouds for developers to build, test, run and manage their applications. Building on Red Hat’s extensive JBoss expertise, OpenShift leads the PaaS market with innovative features, including CDI, and plans support for Java EE 6, extending the capabilities of PaaS to richer and more demanding applications. Building on Red Hat’s open source leadership, OpenShift is designed to end the lock-in of PaaS, allowing users to choose the cloud provider upon which their application will run. OpenShift will be delivered as an online service, at http://openshift.redhat.com.
"Cloud computing is starting to change the way open source developers are writing and delivering applications," said Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO at Hurwitz and Associates. "Therefore the market for platform-as-a-service is beginning to expand at a rapid pace. Red Hat's OpenShift helps developers by providing access to a variety of development and deployment options."
Red Hat OpenShift delivers greater flexibility than any other PaaS, by supporting more development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE. It includes both SQL and NoSQL data stores and a distributed file system. By building on the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard, OpenShift is designed to allow developers to run their applications on any supported Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider, eliminating the lock-in associated with first-generation PaaS vendors.
“Developers turn to open source for innovation and choice. With OpenShift, we deliver the first Platform-as-a-Service that meets those needs,” said Brian Stevens, vice president, Engineering and CTO at Red Hat. “By providing the broadest platform and choice of languages, frameworks and supported cloud providers, OpenShift gives developers the cloud destination they’ve been dreaming of.”
A unique strength of OpenShift is that it brings to PaaS the industry-leading Red Hat and JBoss ecosystems, giving developers access to the industry’s broadest selection of middleware services. For example, OpenShift launches with support for MongoDB and other services certified to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With its broad set of frameworks and languages, including Java, PHP, Python and Ruby, Red Hat OpenShift delivers the broadest set of functionality for developers in the cloud.
In addition to services designed for the needs of new cloud developers, OpenShift is the first public PaaS with Red Hat’s enterprise-class JBoss services, such as transactions, business rules, transactions and messaging, providing the an easy on-ramp to the cloud for enterprise developers. By building on Red Hat’s experience and ecosystem in operating systems, virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, OpenShift uniquely meets the needs of both new cloud developers and enterprises.
