What Customers Want

Today, Red Hat and Microsoft announced a broad partnership that includes many facets including Microsoft becoming a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP), the availability of many of our products on Microsoft Azure, integrated customer service delivery for Red Hat products deployed on premise and on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft .NET integration with many of our platform products, and plans for management tooling integration for open hybrid cloud implementations.

This is something much bigger than just a partnership, and is an evolution that we believe fits perfectly into our overall strategy. Anyone who has followed Red Hat for the past three years knows that we are driving forward with a market vision we refer to as open hybrid cloud. For many, this simply means private-and-public cloud. For Red Hat, we take the word hybrid very seriously, and... it means much more than private and public cloud.

Hybrid means customer choice, and also means acknowledging that most customers have heterogeneous environments. Customers want choice when it comes to the public clouds, and since many rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run their most critical business applications, they are looking for myriad cloud choices for where to run these applications. Making Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on Microsoft Azure

makes sense because Azure stands among a very small set of peers as one of the leading public clouds globally. Furthermore, customers continue to ask for the leading enterprise Linux operating system – Red Hat Enterprise Linux – on Microsoft Azure.

Hybrid also means being equipped to handle the customer’s heterogeneous infrastructure, a.k.a., multi-vendor environments. We’ve long supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual guest across leading hypervisors – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (based on KVM), VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V. We also provide management across these with Red Hat CloudForms. Now we offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux in leading public clouds – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and today, Microsoft Azure, and extend the notion of heterogeneity and multi-vendor support to the public cloud.

Red Hat recognizes the complexity that customers have to manage on a daily basis, and our response is to help them navigate this complexity by empowering them with choices on their terms – enabling them to deal with the heterogeneity of their infrastructure. We also provide unified management tools and support interoperability to help them manage this heterogeneity. Finally, we do this by transforming open source innovation into more secure, enterprise-grade platforms, delivered with a predictable lifecycle and support. We are excited to now extend all of this capability further for our customers as part of the new partnership with Microsoft.