UPDATED 22:00 EDT / OCTOBER 11 2017

CLOUD

Red Hat software and services land on Alibaba Cloud

China’s Alibaba Cloud wants to elevate its relevance in the global public cloud market, and one of the most tried and tested ways of doing that is through teaming up with more established technology partners.

With that in mind, Alibaba Cloud, which is the cloud computing arm of eCommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., said today that it’s partnering with the open-source software company Red Hat Inc. The alliance sees Alibaba Cloud join the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program, which makes it possible for it to offer a range of popular Red Hat products to its customers. These will include the company’s flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, which will soon be made available via a pay-as-you-go pricing model in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace.

The Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program basically means the open-source company has tested its products and services on Alibaba’s cloud and confirmed it meets all of their requirements to run them. Other public cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure are also members of the program. Besides the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, the program also generally covers software such as Red Hat’s OpenShift Enterprise platform as a service, JBoss Middleware and CloudForms platform for cloud management. That means it’s likely those products will be offered on Alibaba’s cloud in coming weeks, too.

“[Customers] want to be able to deploy their technologies of choice on their scalable infrastructure of choice,” said Mike Ferris, vice president for technical business development and business architecture at Red Hat. “That is Red Hat’s vision and the focus of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program.”

Red Hat’s strategy of offering its products and services on major public clouds seems to be paying off for the company. In its fiscal second-quarter earnings call, Red Hat’s Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst noted that revenues from on-demand RHEL via public cloud partners had exceeded a $200 million annualized run rate, and was growing twice as fast as the company’s overall businesses. Given that Alibaba Cloud commands the biggest market share in China, it’s not difficult to see why Red Hat would want to bring its offerings to that platform as well.

The other aspect of the new partnership is aimed at helping Red Hat’s customers move existing on-premises workloads onto Alibaba’s cloud. The company said customers with existing but unused Red Hat subscriptions can move them onto Alibaba Cloud free of charge under its Cloud Access program.

“As enterprises in China, and throughout the world, look to modernize application environments, a full-lifecycle solution by Red Hat on Alibaba Cloud can provide customers higher flexibility and agility,” said Yeming Wang, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global.

Image: Jared Smith/Flickr

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