Symantec and Red Hat together strive to deliver enterprise customers a portfolio of secure, safe and scalable solutions. Most recently, the two companies have worked together to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to customers. Our two companies engage on multiple fronts to allow for such solutions:

Engineering Partnership: We have an engineering-level engagement to ensure current and future releases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform address the changing and growing requirements of enterprise customers at the kernel and community levels. The engagement between the engineering organizations is designed to improve the customer experience by addressing issues early in the platform and application development to ensure mutual customers can confidently deploy Symantec applications.

Certification of applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: A comprehensive set of test suites and environments are used in certifying Symantec applications. The applications are put through the extensive testing infrastructure of both Red Hat (test harness) and Symantec QA infrastructure to ensure all applications are tested appropriately prior to general availability. The second objective includes certification close to the time of the platform version releasing, so customers can seamlessly leverage advances in the platform and applications.

Participation in beta and advanced releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Symantec participates actively and repeatedly in the pre-releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, contributing progressively to the advancement and development of the platform - ensuring Red Hat and Symantec deliver increasing value over time.

Partnership in advancing customer support and timely resolution of issues: Symantec and Red Hat have implemented joint customer resolution processes via TSAnet and joint customer support engagement forums including field engagements. Symantec and Red Hat have jointly launched a Partner Gateway Initiative, a collaborative effort to deliver rapid, highly trained support expertise to customers through joint engineering, pre-release testing and a unique and innovative shared virtual lab support model.

Delivering security solutions to address small and medium enterprises: The leading open source vendor, Red Hat, and leading security technology vendor, Symantec, are delivering a single application stack–supported by both the open source leader and the security leader. This solution enables enterprises to develop end-to-end security solutions that cover mixed operating systems–including Windows and Linux– and offers a value option in contrast to the looming Vista upgrade.

Symantec plans to provide its core Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server and Veritas NetBackup solutions for customers as they adopt the new subscription release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “With thousands of data center implementations on Linux, Symantec customers expect enterprise-class features, performance and service,” said Rob Soderbery, Senior Vice President of Symantec’s Storage Foundation Group. “Symantec is delivering on these expectations, providing solutions that offer the highest levels of availability while exploiting the latest capability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.”

For more information on how Symantec and Red Hat have worked together with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, watch the video and hear more from Rob Soderbery.