Red Hat Cloud Foundations Centers on Portability and Interoperability, Garners Broad Industry Support

Red Hat to open the cloud to thousands of applications

RALEIGH, CAROLINE DU NORD -

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced developments in its Cloud Foundations portfolio that promotes consistency between enterprise applications and the cloud. Red Hat is the only vendor that has the infrastructure capable of delivering an open source, flexible cloud stack, incorporating operating system, middleware and virtualization. Furthermore, this stack is designed to run consistently across physical servers, virtual platforms, private clouds and public clouds. Red Hat's comprehensive solution set enables interoperability and portability, recognizing that customers have IT architectures composed of many different hardware and software components from various vendors. Cloud Foundations is offering capabilities that allow customers to use multiple clouds effectively.

"In our extensive research, we've found that open APIs and interoperability are essential to customers considering the cloud," said Gary Chen, research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC. "Our research shows that 80 percent of enterprises cite the lack of interoperability standards as a challenge in adopting cloud computing services. With Cloud Foundations, Red Hat is on the right track with cloud by accelerating interoperability and portability to prevent cloud lock in."

Comprehensive Approach to Cloud Computing

Red Hat introduced Cloud Foundations in June 2010 during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Cloud Foundations includes Red Hat's comprehensive line of products for implementing a private cloud, coupled with a detailed reference architecture and implementation cookbook, consulting services and training offerings. Based on Red Hat's experience building public and enterprise clouds with its products, the solution was well-received by enterprises looking to build real clouds, today. Select customers are already previewing the technology in Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations.

Focus on Portability

Red Hat's cloud solution uniquely emphasizes portability, providing customers with flexibility and choice across private and public clouds. Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations seeks to provide comprehensive portability for customers with the delivery of new technologies and offerings across four key areas:

  • Portable Computing
    Red Hat's cloud management capabilities offer the tools a customer needs to implement and manage a cloud, providing scalability, robust resource management and portals through an included cloud engine, self-service portal, tools and Deltacloud APIs. The solution allows customers to move computing to their choice of virtualization technology or public cloud virtual machines.
  • Portable Applications
    Red Hat's application builder provides cloud application lifecycle management, letting customers build assemblies to manage the complexities of creating, versioning, configuring, tracking and updating applications for the cloud. With portability of applications and workloads, customers can write an application once and deploy it anywhere. Red Hat's application builder allows customers to manage applications more consistently across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.
  • Portable Services
    The cloud services from Red Hat provide customers with the technologies needed to implement commonly used application features, a key need for deploying private clouds. With Red Hat's cloud services, customers are also able to move these features together with their associated workloads between multiple clouds. For example, storage services provide data persistence, and messaging services enable data to be moved in and out of the cloud.
  • Portable Programming Models
    Via Red Hat's Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, which is designed to protect a company's application investment, by allowing developers to build once and deploy everywhere: on traditional servers, on virtualized servers, on private clouds and in public clouds.

"We are focusing on all four of these areas for portability in the cloud because they form an essential whole," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. "If you can migrate your computational power anywhere you want but your data is tied to a particular cloud, you are still stuck there. At Red Hat, we aim to offer customers the tools they need for the cloud combined with real portability and choice."

Support from Industry-Leading Partners

"Red Hat and Ingres have worked for years to deliver mission-critical infrastructure built on open source and open standards. We look forward to bringing this open approach to the cloud with the Ingres database as a certified solution with Red Hat Cloud Foundations," said Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres. "Customers can combine the Ingres, JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux stack with the Deltacloud API to rapidly build applications that are portable between their private clouds and the leading public cloud providers."

"Intel has a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, working together on Linux, virtualization as well as cloud computing," said Billy Cox, director of Cloud Software Strategy at Intel. "As part of Intel® Cloud Builder, Intel has deployed Red Hat Cloud Foundations in the Intel labs. Together with Red Hat, we will continue to focus on the importance of interoperability, portability and security in cloud solutions."

"As a leading provider of monitoring solutions for cloud infrastructure and cloud service providers, Nimsoft is committed to working with Red Hat to help ensure the portability, interoperability and robust functionality of cloud components," said Mark Rivington, vice president of Technology at Nimsoft, a CA Technologies company. "The 'write once, deploy anywhere' capabilities of Red Hat Cloud Foundations and the open Deltacloud APIs are especially appealing as customers look for ways to ensure the adaptability, scalability, manageability and value of their cloud implementations."

"Together with Red Hat, Symantec helps companies build flexible private cloud infrastructure enabling reduced costs while increasing service levels with our market-leading high-availability solutions," said Don Angspatt, vice president of Product Management at Symantec. "Customers are looking for a flexible, open way to bring their business-critical applications to the cloud without risk, and Symantec's storage management and high-availability solutions, combined with Red Hat Cloud Foundations, enhance these critical workloads and maximize their availability."

"Wipro's open source solutions for cloud technologies support Red Hat Cloud Foundations to help customers achieve business value from community-led cloud innovations. Wipro's offerings include cloud strategy, system integration and enablement of public / private clouds. We've already based new offerings on these technologies like Wipro's wSaaS platform that helps customers launch SaaS applications and manage IaaS leveraging Red Hat Cloud Foundations," said Srini Pallia, senior vice president and global head at Wipro Technologies. "The ease of application development and deployment portability for the Red Hat cloud is extremely compelling. We look forward to working with them to deliver world-class cloud solutions."

Today Red Hat also announced detailed plans for Red Hat PaaS. Please see /about/news/press-archive/2010/paas to read the press release.

For more information about Cloud Foundations, visit www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud.

To learn more about this announcement, join Red Hat and IDC for a press conference that will be broadcast live via webcast at 11am ET on August 25, 2010. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, visit http://www-waa-akam.thomson-webcast.net/us/dispatching/?event_id=4823cc54f791257334ecc3038e901faf&portal_id=af9b227bf07c733390c2738ee0330646.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements, and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov),including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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  • About Red Hat
  • Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.



  • Forward-Looking Statements
  • Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.