An app store of something of a ‘must-have’ for any budding tech giant these days, and that’s why Red Hat has become the latest player to launch its own digital marketplace. The Linux company has just announced the arrival of its OpenShift Marketplace to help reduce the time it takes for admins to layer third-party apps atop its OpenShift PaaS.

OpenShift was announced as the company kicked off its annual Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, and promises to give customers easier access to add-ons from its partners, which include software makers like BladeMeter, ClearDB, Iron.io, MongoLab, New Relic, Redis Labs, SendGrid, and Shippable.

Red Hat says that new partners are expected to join the marketplace in future, which should see a sizable collection of apps in place by the time it launches “in the coming weeks”. The company said to expect a breadth of add-on productivity offerings for application performance monitoring, database management, email delivery services, messaging queues and so on.

Having a marketplace ensures things will be much smoother for Red Hat users, who previously had to go to providers directly and manually integrate any third-party software. With OpenShift Marketplace, Red Hat has cut the number of steps involved in linking technology to its OpenShift instances, whilst consolidating billing and account management. In turn, Red Hat hopes this will encourage developers to build more elaborate apps on top of its OpenShift PaaS.

Marketplaces like this are one of the most popular ways that companies can grow interest in their technology products, especially for customers who manage complex estates of software. Cloud leaders AWS has already had its own third-party software marketplace up and running for several years, and its been hugely popular with its customers, even though its grown to such an extent that it can be somewhat confusing for those who’re new to the cloud.

The marketplace strategy reinforces Red Hat’s image as a ‘team player’, whilst helping to promote it as an all-inclusive, one-stop shop at a time when reducing hassles in setting up hardware and software is more in-demand than ever. The marketplace will also give Red Hat valuable insights as to what apps and services people are layering atop its OpenShift PaaS, which it can use to develop more products of its own.

“The OpenShift Marketplace is our next step towards our goal of providing customers the widest variety of choice when it comes to technologies that complement their OpenShift experience,” said Julio Tapia, director, OpenShift ecosystem, Red Hat

“As the OpenShift partner ecosystem continues to expand, we expect the Marketplace to provide developers and customers a more streamlined, secure experience to choose the best third-party solutions for their productivity and business enablement needs.”

OpenShift Marketplace is the first of many new introductions expected from Red Hat and its partners at the four-day 2014 Red Hat Summit. The marketplace is set to roll out to all regions withing “the next few weeks”, though vendors can access a preview version now if they contact Red Hat directly.

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