Red Hat is preparing a cloud surprise for partners in October 2011. Indeed, Red Hat’s first-ever North America Partner Summit (Oct. 25-27, Miami) will include a Cloud Symposium designed for VARs, integrators and cloud services providers (CSPs).
Roger Egan, Red Hat’s VP of North America Channels, discussed the strategy a bit during CompTIA Breakaway, a channel gathering this week in Washington, D.C.
It sounds like DeltaCloud will be a key theme at the Red Hat symposium in October. DeltaCloud is a standard API (application programming interface) that will allow partners to easily move applications between private clouds and public clouds, Egan pointed out. The key requirement: The cloud platforms need to leverage the API.
Red Hat has been talking about DeltaCloud since at least September 2009. The company offered a video overview in March 2010, followed by a momentum update in August 2010. But I have to admit: I hadn’t heard about DeltaCloud until Egan mentioned it to me this week.
Also at Red Hat’s summit, I think it’s also a safe bet to expect an update on Red Hat’s OpenShift (Platform as a Service) and CloudForms (Infrastructure as a Service) efforts.
Bigger Rivals
Red Hat certainly has momentum; the company is on track to become a billion-dollar company this fiscal year. But Red Hat’s cloud components are immature, and the company faces some massive giants in the cloud race — most notably Microsoft and VMware… especially since building clouds often starts with virtualization. Aiming to close the gap, Red Hat has certified more than 400 professionals on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which is built on KVM (kernel-based virtual machine).
Also of note: In a recent open letter to the government, Red Hat warned public service leaders not to get locked into proprietary cloud platforms — a not-so-subtle jab at Microsoft’s desktop legacy and current cloud strategy.
But for Red Hat’s partners, the bigger story is the fast-approaching North America Partner Summit, where a cloud symposium could help VARs and CSPs to wrap their arms around Red Hat’s strategy.
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