Red Hat Formally Announces RHX Application Exchange

Published: May 15, 2007

by Dan Burger

As promised two months ago at the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat, the company that many IT shops associate with enterprise Linux distribution, has broadened its business scope by introducing Red Hat Exchange (RHX), an agreement with 14 third-party application providers to become front-line support for their software.

The official company line on the business decision is that the process of researching, purchasing, deploying, and support for business application software needed to be streamlined. Another take on this is that the devil made them do it. The part of the devil is being played, of course, by Oracle, which sells middleware and application software to midrange and high-end customers and which now competes with Red Hat in the operating space by offering discounted support for a variant of RHEL 4 that Oracle calls Unbreakable Linux. The Red Hat Exchange will sell the applications as normal packages as well as within a software-as-a-service (SaaS) distribution model as well.

The companies that have signed on with Red Hat include: MySQL, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, Pentaho, and EnterpriseDB, which are the "founding partners." Centric CRM, Zmanda, JasperSoft, Zenoss, Compiere, Jive, Groundwork, and Scalix have also joined up. EnterpriseDB is the only non open-source vendor in the group.

The partnership connects the Red Hat customer base with what Matt Mattox, director of Red Hat Exchange product management, described at a press conference during the Red Hat Summit in San Diego last week, as a "shortlist of business solutions."

Mattox also took the high road by saying, "Not many of our competitors in the proprietary world can claim to be an honest broker in the application space. But we are taking the long view here. We see this as an investment in a rising tide with greater opportunity for the ecosystem."

It could also be said that not many vendors in the proprietary world can claim the Linux customer base that Red Hat can. Not many as in none. Certainly Oracle is no threat in that regard and neither is IBM or HP.

RHX challenges the traditional partner ecosystem model and opening up the infrastructure that Red Hat has built its own business on to the next generation of open source businesses represented by 14 partners," says Donald Fischer, vice president of online services at Red Hat.

The Red Hat Exchange fills in another level in the enterprise software stack. That stack is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the operating system level, JBoss (acquired by Red Hat in July 2006) at the middleware level, and RHX at the business application software management layer.

Mattox described RHX as more than just marketing and support. "We're actively working with each partner to facilitate the download and update process using Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) and Red Hat Network (RHN). An example of our engineering collaboration is the work that the JBoss portal team is doing with the Alfresco team to add flexibility and extensibility to Alfresco's content management system."

RELATED STORIES

Red Hat to Push Desktop Linux with Intel Partnership

Red Hat Integrates and Simplifies with RHEL 5

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot