Business enterprises aren’t shy about their desire embrace “digital transformation,” and the companies that provide much of their information technology infrastructure are falling over themselves to help make it happen.

Red Hat Inc., which supplies a wide range of IT tools and infrastructure based on open-source software, is one such company. In order to help customers adopt new technologies such as cloud computing and software containers, it announced today a new “infrastructure migration solution” that it says will provide a “launchpad” for these digital transformation efforts.

In its pitch, Red Hat noted what many analysts are saying, which is that legacy virtualization infrastructure is basically stifling enterprise innovation. It said companies want to move to a hybrid cloud-based infrastructure, where their workloads span multiple virtual, on-premises and cloud environments. The benefits of doing so include improved efficiency, decision making, productivity and ultimately, profitability.

The new Red Hat Infrastructure Migration service is really just a jazzed-up consulting service that aims to make digital transformation happen as quickly as possible. The idea is to provide an “enterprise-ready pathway to cloud-native application development,” involving the adoption of technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, automation and more.

Of course, Red Hat’s service is specifically aimed at getting companies to adopt its own versions of these technologies, and it’s being led by its Red Hat Consulting unit, which takes a three-phased approach to migrating legacy workloads to Red Hat platforms. These include a “discovery session” that involves planning which workloads and applications to migrate to the new infrastructure; a migration pilot that serves to demonstrate that it will actually work; and finally “migration at scale,” which is when everything gets shipped over to the new infrastructure.

“This is essentially a pitch of Red Hat Consulting to assist customers in migration projects where there’s clear focus on migrating to all things Red Hat for next-generation virtualization,” said James Kobielus, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE. “It strikes a balance between modernization and protecting investments in hypervisor/VMs that are not easily migratable.”

Red Hat goes a bit overboard in its pitch, detailing a long list of its own platforms and services that can be used to help with the migration, including its Red Hat Virtualization platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure.

But migration tools such as these are two a penny in the enterprise. Public cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. for example, offer a variety of services aimed at doing the same, while smaller entities such as Pivot3 offer tools that can migrate workloads to any public cloud platform. So it’s uncertain to what extent Red Hat’s promise of assistance will convince new customers to look at its technology.

“It’s a transparent attempt to depict other vendors’ hypervisor and virtualization technologies as being worthy of migrating away from due to their being ‘proprietary,’” Kobielus said. “It’s highly debatable whether that resonates with IT administrators who have invested deeply in other virtualization technologies associated with disparate OSes and other application platforms.”

Red Hat said its Infrastructure Migration service is available from today.

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