Live from the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat outlined its cloud strategy and roadmap with several new announcements, including the introduction of a new family of offerings known as Cloud Foundations, delivering comprehensive solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds. The Cloud Foundations offering includes industry-leading products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, expert professional services and training classes – elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds.

As part of Cloud Foundations, Red Hat Consulting introduced two new offerings for our customers: Cloud Quickstart and Cloud Foundations Pathway. Despite the publicized benefits of cloud computing, most organizations are still determining whether and how to apply it to their business. With these new offerings today, Red Hat Consulting is helping organizations pursuing a path to cloud adoption navigate through the uncertainty and establish a solid foundation. Our business and technical consulting services paired with Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Edition One are designed to help customers demonstrate a prototype cloud infrastructure solution, develop a strategic roadmap for cloud adoption, and establish a solid foundation for present and future cloud initiatives.

Here’s more information about our new offerings:

Cloud Quickstart
Red Hat Cloud Quickstart equips organizations with the expertise, high-level support and knowledge transfer to rapidly build, manage and optimize a cloud solution tailored to a customer’s unique technology environment. Designed to provide an optimal introduction to cloud computing, the Cloud Quickstart leverages Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, Edition One reference architecture to help assess the viability of a cloud environment for a customer’s enterprise.

During this short-term engagement, an experienced consultant will:

• Demonstrate a prototype cloud infrastructure solution,
• Install, setup and configure Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Edition One set of integrated products, documentation and reference architectures (to 10 servers),
• Prepare IT staff to manage virtualization tasks independently after the engagement, and
• Provide knowledge transfer and complete documentation

For customers ready to develop proof points of cloud viability, the Quickstart can be coupled with the option to migrate 1-2 workloads to the established test cloud to deliver a proof of concept.

Cloud Foundations Pathway
A recommended first step in any cloud strategy is to ensure a customer’s infrastructure is ready and optimized for cloud computing. To help organizations move into a future of cloud computing and business agility, Red Hat offers its Cloud Foundations Pathway. This strategic service consists of a series of tailored consulting engagements that leverage open source expertise, product recommendations and best practices to:

• Explore cloud viability,
• Develop a strategic roadmap for cloud adoption, and
• Establish a cloud platform to serve as the foundation for present and future cloud computing initiatives.

Each Pathway begins with an assessment of the organization’s business goals, the maturity of its IT infrastructure, an exploration of open standards, concepts and alternatives and strategic recommendations for the organization to achieve its business goals.

These new cloud Consulting services from Red Hat are available today. To learn more about these offerings, visit here.