Red Hat Deepens Partnership With Google, SAP, and Oracle

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has deepened partnerships with some of the leading cloud computing providers, Google Cloud, SAP, and Oracle, through a flurry of new integration and expanded partnership announcements. 

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as the leaders of the cloud computing market, tend to get the lion’s share of integrations and partnerships. By focusing on some of the ancillary services, Red Hat is promoting a more balanced cloud ecosystem with multiple providers, and giving businesses more opportunities to integrate with other platforms. 

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“Our focus has always been in open hybrid cloud, to be able to provide choice—to give folks a platform that allows them then to select where and how do they want to run and give them choice,” said Stefanie Chiras, president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat, to CRN. “They make the decision on the platform that opens up a world of choice around it. And that choice is dependent upon us having an ecosystem that is trusted that we’ve worked with and that matters to them.”

Red Hat announced that the Ansible Automation Platform will be available on Google Cloud Marketplace, providing customers with a way to simplify self-deployments. The platform was previously only available on AWS and Azure. 

Through Google Cloud, customers are able to access pre-integrated services such as Google Compute and Google Virtual Private Cloud. On Red Hat’s side, customers can use the Ansible Certified Content Collection to automate across an organization, and share and manage content across all types of devices. 

“Customers have pivoted—it’s more than just picking a vendor,” said Chiras. “It’s picking a relationship with whom you want to go forward with. And particularly with the big hyperscalers, customers are making a decision about who they want to have a relationship with. And committed spend programs are part of the way they make that relationship. And so this provides us a way to participate in that experience.”

SAP announced that it will migrate the SAP Cloud Services portfolio onto the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) foundation. It will now be the preferred operating system for Rise with SAP, which combines SAP’s Cloud Services, business process intelligence, and other services. 

“We see partners like SAP taking customers on that journey and to Rise,” said Chiras. “They have a whole ecosystem of their own. This partnership really deepens and instills that they are making a choice with Red Hat. That will then infuse how we can help SAP and their customers adopt and get the value out of Rise.”

Red Hat will work with SAP over the next few years to accelerate the adoption and standardization of RHEL.

Finally, Red Hat has also come to an agreement with Oracle to let customers standardize cloud operations on RHEL OS. Customers can use either vendor to fix issues. Red Hat is working with Oracle to certify RHEL for Oracle’s bare-metal servers. 

“A significant number of customers rely on both Red Hat and OCI to run their operations and require more choice for distributed cloud deployments than ever before,” said Clay Magouyrk, Oracle’s executive vice president for Oracle Cloud. “Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility.”