On Wednesday Red Hat, Inc. announced new offerings, ecosystem infrastructure and services designed to provide CIOs with a comprehensive, easy on-ramp to cloud computing. The company announces the expansion of development services that provide customers with the tools and expertise needed to deploy and manage cloud environments as well as enhancements to the Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider Program.

"Just as we made Linux a safe place to run mission-critical applications with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are focused on making the cloud a safe place for enterprise applications," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat. "Red Hat is at the forefront of the industry with a broad portfolio of enterprise cloud solutions, and is driving the expansion of the cloud for new users, from developers to enterprises, with our expanded cloud offerings available today."

Simplifying the Deployment and Management of Cloud Solutions
Red Hat has announced Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a major new offering family delivering comprehensive solutions for planning, building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service private and public clouds. Each Red Hat Cloud Foundation offering includes industry-leading products, implementation cookbooks and reference architectures, expert professional services and training classes -- elements necessary to successfully create and operate clouds. With Cloud Foundations, customers can achieve the benefits of the cloud today, with lower risk and simple, easy implementation. These offerings are designed to significantly expand the reach and appeal of cloud, offer the richest set of development and deployment environments in the industry and deliver consistency between the datacenter and public clouds.

The first in this family, Cloud Foundations: Edition One, is available immediately. Cloud Foundations: Edition One enables customers to deploy real private clouds today, and includes:

• Industry-leading products for implementing a private cloud, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.
• A cookbook implementation guide, making cloud setup quick and simple.
• A detailed reference architecture providing step-by-step instructions, scripts and settings for creating and configuring the private cloud. The reference architecture transfers the years of experience and knowledge Red Hat engineers have built and refined while creating private and public clouds for some of the world's largest and most demanding companies.
• Consulting services to enable turnkey assessment, implementation and operational management of a private cloud. Included in the Cloud Foundations services family are Red Hat Cloud Quickstart, which helps customers explore the usage of cloud computing in their infrastructure and develop proof points of cloud viability, and Red Hat Pathway to Cloud Computing, designed for customers ready to start strategic planning and deployment of cloud technologies.
• Training classes, to transfer knowledge and best practices to customers, creating a strong base of skills among their staff quickly and efficiently.

Trailblazing with Enhanced Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider Program
Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat established the industry's first program to certify that vendors have validated cloud capabilities and support processes that provide rapid problem resolution. Red Hat today expands the program to include new partners IBM, NTT Communications and Savvis, and introduces new benefits of the program. Red Hat announced the establishment of the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program in June 2009 with its first member, Amazon Web Services.

Through the Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat delivers more industry-leading offerings, including:

• Cloud-specific Red Hat offerings and pricing designed to make the cloud accessible and attractive to developers, administrators and users.
• Preconfigured, certified Red Hat images enabled with cloud-specific configuration and security settings to make deployments simple and secure. This includes pre-configured firewall and SELinux settings for secure cloud use the moment an image is started.
• Innovative management and updating services built for scale and designed to provide maximum security and lower costs, while ensuring consistency between customer datacenter and public cloud environments.
• Extension of Red Hat partner ISV certification to public clouds, enabling enterprise solution availability and consistency regardless of deployment choices.

Through the program, Certified Cloud Providers can run any supported virtualization solution, ranging from Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to VMware and Microsoft platforms. In addition, Premier Certified Cloud Providers are able to deliver Red Hat Cloud Access, an innovative and flexible licensing model that allows customers to easily use existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions in the datacenter or the cloud, thereby driving easy cloud adoption.

Delivering Enterprise-Class Cloud Development Environments for Cloud Providers, Enterprises and Solutions Providers

Red Hat is also announcing its strategy to enable enterprises and Certified Cloud Providers to deliver industry-leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities, opening the cloud to a new range of developers, from large enterprises and the ISVs who serve them, to emerging Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.

Red Hat's PaaS roadmap describes a comprehensive solution that enables users to build and deploy applications within cloud environments while bridging their on-premise application environments. It will be based upon the comprehensive JBoss Enterprise Middleware product line and become part of the Red Hat Cloud Foundations family of solutions.

Red Hat's strategy is designed to provide a path for the large installed base of Linux, Java and JBoss users, enabling them to easily deploy applications to the cloud, and is also designed to attract new developers, both within traditional ISVs and enterprises, and new ISVs who are creating SaaS solutions from scratch. Red Hat leverages the flexibility of JBoss Open Choice, an application platform approach for supporting virtually any programming model and language. Red Hat PaaS will support Java, Ruby on Rails and the Spring Framework, as well as many other languages and scripting environments.

Red Hat's PaaS solution will also provide tools for easily developing, deploying and managing cloud-based applications. The capabilities will include tools and services for deploying and configuring an application within a cloud environment. It will also include the capabilities for managing the application environment to optimize services and resources.

Red Hat is also introducing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux developer offerings, available exclusively through Red Hat Certified Cloud Providers. These offerings are designed to give SaaS developers the easiest on-ramp to the cloud, and provide a consistent environment for development and deployment. By providing access to a robust, open development platform on certified clouds, Red Hat simplifies the on-ramp for cloud application development and enables more rapid delivery of SaaS solutions based on the leading open source application platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

By providing the full breadth of enterprise-quality capabilities, including virtualization, operating systems, middleware and application frameworks, now backed by the Red Hat Cloud Foundations solution and the expanded Certified Cloud Provider Program, Red Hat is unique in its ability to provide a consistent environment between cloud and on-premise environments.