Red Hat, Inc. on Wednesday announced its strategy for OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), an open cloud application platform for enterprises, to enable enterprises to take advantage of the benefits of PaaS by providing a consistent environment for both public cloud and on-premise datacenter usage. Under the roadmap, Red Hat plans to extend OpenShift PaaS to allow enterprises to use both leading-edge DevOps operational models, as well as traditional application management methodologies. Building on the core technology stack that already powers the OpenShift public PaaS, Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS for enterprises will help provide the benefits of cloud computing in a way that maximizes both operational flexibility and application development efficiency.

“While use of PaaS and the blending of application development and deployment known as DevOps are growing rapidly and we expect the enterprise PaaS market to be worth more than $3 billion by 2015, it is still early days for PaaS offerings, combinations and support,” said Jay Lyman, senior analyst for 451 Research, a division of leading global analyst and data company The 451 Group. “That's why it is critical that the underlying components and supported pieces of PaaS are open, flexible and available the way customers and developers want them, which is typically in the cloud, on-premises or both. Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS benefits from its depth of enterprise Java support for the application lifecycle and Java EE6. This is key for enterprises looking to scale, automate and treat software as services, not only for new applications and development, but also for their large, legacy investment, infrastructure and process around existing applications.”

OpenShift To Date
Red Hat introduced OpenShift PaaS in May 2011, delivering to developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications. Since then, the OpenShift platform has evolved to include emerging development languages such as Node.js and became the first PaaS to support Java EE 6 and to offer comprehensive lifecycle support for Java in the cloud. Red Hat also made available to the open source community the code that powers its OpenShift platform through the open source OpenShift Origin project in April 2012.

Enterprise PaaS Roadmap

Today’s enterprises often have real-world operational requirements that are not supported by current PaaS offerings. Enterprises have operational considerations around compliance, enterprise architecture standards (including ITIL or other methodologies), IT governance, security, application lifecycle management, application development methodologies, organizational and process restrictions, data and compute locality and privacy restrictions and more. PaaS solutions must enable IT to empower their developers with these platforms while still implementing the PaaS in a way that meets their enterprise requirements.

“With the growth of the cloud market, developers have embraced PaaS due to the agility, speed and flexibility these platforms offer. Of the many PaaS offerings available, we haven’t seen any yet address the full needs of the enterprise,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat. “However someone wants to build and manage their applications, they should be able to. With the PaaS roadmap and strategy we are outlining today, we’re paving the way for enterprises to use a Red Hat-powered open cloud application platform to build and run their applications, however best fits their business needs.”

Red Hat’s enterprise PaaS roadmap addresses the use cases and current challenges for enterprise PaaS adoption. Through OpenShift PaaS, Red Hat is delivering a leading cloud application platform that offers built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, proven enterprise-grade application containers, middleware, services and the latest technologies. Today, Red Hat brings this platform to more users through a variety of new locations and with multiple management model options. Combining the core enterprise technologies that power OpenShift PaaS– including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Storage, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and OpenShift’s integrated programming languages, frameworks and developer tools – Red Hat plans to deliver the OpenShift cloud application platform available as a PaaS for enterprises in an open and hybrid cloud.

OpenShift PaaS will be designed to provide a choice of consumption models across multiple cloud providers enabling enterprises to:

• Use OpenShift as a service, available in developer preview since May 2011 via openshift.redhat.com. A fee-based version of this service with full support from Red Hat is expected to be available later this year.
• Deploy and manage their own private PaaS leveraging the OpenShift PaaS platform, built on Red Hat enterprise technology.
• Deploy OpenShift on a variety of cloud and virtualization providers.

Red Hat plans to extend the OpenShift enterprise PaaS platform to provide a choice of management and operational models, including:

• A DevOps model that empowers developers to deploy and manage their applications via either a Public PaaS solution at openshift.redhat.com or a Private PaaS solution with OpenShift on-premise.
• An ITOps model that enables IT operations teams to provide the benefits of PaaS to their developers while maintaining centralized control of their applications and infrastructure, based on OpenShift with Red Hat CloudForms as the foundation.
• Self-managed and available offline by running OpenShift on a developer laptop.

For more information on Red Hat’s PaaS Strategy, join Red Hat executives for a virtual press conference webcast announcement at 11am ET on May 9. The webcast will also be available for replay. To register for the live broadcast or to access the replay, visit https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=9415.

To learn more about or to access OpenShift, visit openshift.redhat.com.

To read more on Red Hat’s perspective on the seven properties of an open cloud, visit http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/2/The-Open-Cloud-Red-Hats-Perspective.

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 more than 70 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with cloud, virtualization, management, storage and service-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.

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