Hybrid and multicloud environments are quickly becoming a standard for global enterprises, as flexibility, freedom of choice and workload portability become necessities in successfully building and deploying applications. When public cloud providers first entered the market, many insisted that all workloads be deployed on a single public cloud. At Red Hat, we recognized early on that users wanted and needed the flexibility to operate across many different environments, from public and private clouds to virtual systems and bare metal.

Over the past eight years, Red Hat has been defining and building hybrid clouds with Red Hat OpenShift to provide operational consistency and portability across any environment. By leveraging the enterprise-grade Kubernetes and cloud-native capabilities of OpenShift, organizations can more seamlessly follow a hybrid cloud strategy and achieve the agility they need to generate impactful business results.

Introducing Red Hat Marketplace

Today, Red Hat and IBM announced the general availability of Red Hat Marketplace to further support customers migrating to the open hybrid cloud. Through Red Hat Marketplace, users can access the tools and services needed to build cloud-native applications across public and private cloud environments through one curated repository.

This is the first enterprise software and service marketplace designed specifically for hybrid cloud computing. Previously, cloud marketplaces offered third-party products to run in a given public cloud, but the configurations used for one cloud may not transfer to another. Red Hat Marketplace offers solutions certified for Red Hat OpenShift that can be used across any cloud, making the concept of write once, run anywhere a reality.

In true Red Hat fashion, Red Hat Marketplace is founded on open source. As an open cloud market, it enables independent software vendors (ISVs) and cloud service providers to offer industry leading tools and services for building hybrid cloud applications with confidence. From artificial intelligence (AI) to management and integration services to DevOps tools, users can access a wide range of leading software solutions on Red Hat Marketplace all of which are certified to run on the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.

Supported by a growing ecosystem

Red Hat’s partner ecosystem has always been committed to serving customers with innovative, trusted open source solutions. With Red Hat Marketplace, our technology partners can make their solutions more easily accessible to customers. All of the software available on Red Hat Marketplace is certified through the Red Hat OpenShift Operator Certification program, and includes upgrades, lifecycle management, log processing and auto-scaling across all OpenShift 4 footprints.

By listing available certified Operators on Red Hat Marketplace, partners can provide a streamlined purchasing experience for customers to access, try, buy and deploy applications on a single platform. At launch, Red Hat Marketplace offers more than 50 commercial products from partners across 12 different categories as well as other Red Hat and IBM products that complement OpenShift.

Red Hat Marketplace is a key offering that goes beyond streamlining the customer experience, however. The hybrid cloud nature of the Marketplace makes it easier for our partners to offer their applications and services to a broader set of organizations across a wide range of deployment options. With Marketplace, Red Hat partners don’t need to worry about tailoring an application for a specific cloud or for datacenter workloads; their Operator-based application runs anywhere OpenShift does with the backing of Red Hat.

Offering a personalized experience

In the spirit of flexibility and choice, we are also launching a private marketplace option for organizations to create a customized platform with hand-picked, pre-approved software and services to meet their unique operational and developer needs. Red Hat Marketplace Select,available at an additional cost, includes all the same features and functionality of Red Hat Marketplace with the added benefit to personalize the site and software selections.

Organizations can now enjoy greater control and governance of curated, certified software while streamlining innovation and improving cost management. This is especially useful for enterprises interested in deploying software across public cloud and on-premises environments. With Red Hat Marketplace Select, IT leaders have the ability to improve discoverability of company-approved tools and accelerate processes for developers to manage deployments whenever and wherever needed.

In the years to come, we expect Red Hat Marketplace and Red Hat Marketplace Select to make it easier to build innovative and dynamic cloud-native applications across the hybrid multicloud landscape. This is Red Hat’s vision for the future, and it begins with the open hybrid cloud.