Red Hat Announces Appliance Platform to Improve Economics and Expand Market for Software Vendors Enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified applications to be run as appliances on industrys broadest

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the worlds leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its plans to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to deliver appliance-based solutions to their customers, broadening their market reach while minimizing their development and support costs. The Red Hat Appliance Operating System will allow applications that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX and Microsoft Windows Viridian. Red Hats Linux Automation strategy, also announced today, delivers a standardized development, deployment and management infrastructure for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem.

“Red Hat allows ISVs to bring better solutions to market faster, while reaching a broader range of customers, without the expense of porting and maintaining software on multiple operating systems”, said Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO and vice president, Engineering. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based appliances, enjoying the full suite of Linux Automation capabilities, will enable ISVs to deliver software in a form that is significantly easier for their customers to acquire, configure, deploy and manage.”

"New software form factors such as software appliances have to overcome user skepticism, including concerns over what software elements are integrated inside the appliance itself," said Brett Waldman, Research Analyst, System Software at IDC. "Red Hats solution will reduce the barrier to adoption of software appliances by alleviating some of the packaging concerns, allowing ISVs to create appliances using the same processes and certifications as their other applications based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
The Red Hat Appliance Operating System (AOS) is built from the industrys leading open source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with which it shares full ABI and API compatibility. It includes the Virtual Appliance Development Kit (vADK) that will allow ISVs to easily configure the operating system along with their middleware and applications to produce a complete system image. Thousands of existing software vendors will be able to leverage this new deployment model without extra development effort. Red Hat reduces complexity for ISVs, allowing them to develop, test and certify a solution once. Deployment is then seamless across standalone servers, virtual machines, appliances and web-scale “cloud” computing environments. ISVs significantly reduce their development costs by standardizing on a single operating system – “certify once, deploy anywhere.”

Today, Red Hat also announced that a wide range of software solutions on Red Hat Exchange are available for trial and purchase as pre-configured software appliances. Customers can quickly and easily purchase and deploy an integrated solution consisting of third-party software, JBoss middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with no installation or configuration complexity. The total time necessary to purchase, install and use these solutions is just minutes.

The Red Hat Appliance Operating System is planned for availability in the first half of 2008. Independent Software Vendors interested in the participating in Red Hats Appliance program are requested to contact appliance-info@redhat.com.