Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced enhancements to its partner offerings centered around open hybrid cloud innovation and in support of the growing demand for cloud-native solutions within the Red Hat ecosystem. Using the proven innovations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and Red Hat OpenShift 4 as the foundation, Red Hat Partner Connect is expanding its certification programs and support services to better equip partners for an IT world built on hybrid and multicloud deployments.

Red Hat Partner Connect provides many partnership opportunities, including certification offerings and enablement for software, hardware, services and cloud service providers that develop products and services for Red Hat hybrid cloud platforms. The program offers partners a set of tools and alignment opportunities to automate, accelerate and streamline modern application development for the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift. Certified partner products deliver interoperable, supported solutions to customers. Marketing and sales related benefits are also available to partners completing certification programs.

Participating Red Hat technology partners can now access:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux with certified containers based on Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI), which now enables partners to include any Red Hat Enterprise Linux user-space packages in UBI-based container images and redistribute them through both official Red Hat and third-party container registries.

• Enhancements to OpenShift Operator Certification, including increased technical assistance, tooling and workflows to accelerate the certification process for Kubernetes Operators. Red Hat is also offering new promotional and go-to-market support to facilitate a faster path to customer adoption and deployments on Red Hat OpenShift.

• Updated resources and tools via the new Red Hat Partner Connect website experience and unified Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, each designed to help technology vendors and service providers take advantage of opportunities to partner with Red Hat, optimize collaborative efforts and better support customers on the path to IT modernization. As part of a new “build, sell or service” model, the reimagined website offers an integrated platform for partners to more easily access resources and tools to build open hybrid solutions, access new markets and expand operational services.

• Red Hat’s ‘Get Help’ support desk to guide partners through the certification process in a simple and consistent manner for a more seamless certification experience, accelerating time to market with hybrid cloud, cloud-native solutions.

To learn more about the latest certification and support offerings, and start building on Red Hat hybrid cloud platforms, visit connect.redhat.com.

Lars Herrmann, senior director of technology partnerships, Red Hat said: “Transitioning to cloud-native offerings without vendor lock-in is complex, and existing and prospective Red Hat partners are often unaware of what it takes to enable business agility, freedom of choice and enterprise quality all at once. Meeting business and IT needs in the enterprise is greatly simplified by building on Red Hat’s hybrid cloud platforms. By making it easier to take advantage of our certification offerings for containerized, Kubernetes applications, we are creating a more seamless experience for both partners and customers to explore, develop and adopt cloud-native applications on hybrid and multi-cloud, while avoiding vendor lock-in and forced business model changes. We are excited to see how our partner ecosystem leverages these improved offerings to help customers remain competitive and meet market demand with open hybrid cloud innovation.”