New Partners and Website for Red Hat Exchange (RHX)

 

RHX website screenshot. Click to enlarge.

Approaching its one-year anniversary in May, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has some exciting new updates. We’ve added two new partners already in 2008: Ingres and Hyperic. And, today, RHX will take on a new look with a refresh of the RHX website.

RHX launched last year with the goal of helping Red Hat’s customers engage with the open source ISV ecosystem. During the 11 months since we’ve been in the market, we’ve learned a lot about the best way to meet that goal. In some cases, we learned what didn’t work and made changes to the offering.

Our initial offering featured pre-built stacks available via online purchasing and web support. Demand from large enterprise customers was actually stronger than we anticipated. In order to serve these customers, we had to change the sales and support model. By September, we introduced 24×7 support and started working large enterprise deals directly. We also launched pre-built appliances - available via download or immediate access in the cloud - in order to streamline the test drive process. The results came quickly and we received positive feedback from our customers on these changes.

RHX is now poised to take the next step and become a core part of Red Hat’s alliances organization. Some of the features of the RHX partnership model - packaging and testing guidelines, appliance development, joint marketing, solution selling, and integrated support – will be extended to other software partners. By the same token, we anticipate that RHX solutions will increasingly be featured in Red Hat’s core campaigns focused on driving costs out of IT budgets.

Our new partners Hyperic and Ingres are two exciting open source players with which we’re pleased to be partnering in RHX. Ingres rounds out an impressive group of open source databases available through RHX, and they’re already collaborating with RHX member Alfresco on a content management solution.

Red Hat has an important technology partnership with Hyperic, with whom we recently launched the RHQ project at JBoss World Orlando. RHQ is a common services project for Middleware Management. It’s being collaboratively developed by Red Hat and Hyperic. The new project provides a common set of management services, which will be incorporated into future editions of Red Hat products such as JBoss Operations Network and Red Hat Network, as well as Hyperic HQ. Additional details on the RHQ project are available here and here.

RHX will continue its focus on open source. We will soon be introducing a program for bringing more enterprise applications into both Fedora and EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). Providing increased access to open source business applications via these avenues will accelerate community building within the enterprise and leverage the broad reach of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to continue extending the value of open source to customers. And, last week at OSBC, we met some impressive open source players that we look to collaborate with for the future of RHX.

See our new RHX website.