Introducing Red Hat Exchange (RHX)

We’re excited to announce that, as of today, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) is now open for business. Missed the press release? See it here. RHX is focused on streamlining the process of researching, purchasing, deploying and getting support for business application software.

Here’s a list of what software buyers get from RHX:

• A single subscription agreement that covers all third-party and Red Hat provided solutions at RHX - we refer to our partners’ license and indemnification terms, but all of the core legalese is standardized
• Objective, fact-based profiles of the participating software companies and their offerings
• User ratings and reviews of the offerings - open source is based on transparency and meritocracy, right?
• A knowledgebase that spans all software applications at RHX - our knowledgebase is called “Answers” and is chock full of user-generated content capabilities, including ratings, comments, tagging and an “ask the community a question” feature
• Free trials for all offerings
• Easy online buying that supports major credit cards
• Streamlined download and installation - we’re working with all of our partners to help them leverage the power of RPM and RHN
• One stop support - RHX engineers provide a single technical support contact for all elements of the solutions purchased through RHX - from the operating system to the application

We’ve had a lot of help from our software partners in getting RHX ready for today’s launch. Particularly from our founding partners - Alfresco, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Zimbra, MySQL and EnterpriseDB. These founding partners actively contributed to the creation of RHX from helping us define the RHX support model to brainstorming on marketing initiatives. In addition to these founding six partners, we’ve added eight ISV partners to the RHX family too - Centric CRM, Zmanda, JasperSoft, ZenOSS, Compiere, Jive, Groundwork and Scalix.

With RHX, we’re doing exciting things. We’re collaborating with our software partners on more than just marketing and support. We’re actively working with each partner to facilitate the download and update process using RPM and RHN. An example of our engineering collaboration is the work that the JBoss portal team is doing with the Alfresco team in order to add flexibility and extensibility to Alfresco’s content management system. Attending the Red Hat Summit? You’ll have an opportunity to take a look at a pre-release version of this offering at the Alfresco booth.

Today is just the starting point for RHX. We will be rolling out enhancements and extensions to RHX and additional partnerships over the coming months. Stay tuned. In the meantime, to start working with RHX, see here.