Open Source software firm Red Hat lifted the lid on its OpenShift PaaS strategy, which it wants to become a serious competitor to the likes of Microsoft’s Azure, VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Heroku.
It said its goal was to broaden the use of the open source platform from its early adopters, which used it solely on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud, to enterprises running a variety of clouds.
It said that enterprises have operational considerations around compliance, enterprise architecture standards, IT governance, security, among other things and that PaaS “must enable IT to empower their developers with these platforms while still implementing the PaaS in a way that meets their enterprise requirements.”
The roadmap outlines use cases and current challenges for enterprise PaaS adoption. Through OpenShift PaaS, Red Hat said its cloud application platform would offer built-in secure and scalable multi-tenancy, enterprise-grade application containers, middleware and services.
Red Hat will also be porting the technology to multiple cloud infrastructures and have multiple management model options. OpenShift combines a number of open source technologies including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Storage, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and OpenShift’s integrated programming languages, frameworks and developer tools – Red Hat plans to deliver the OpenShift cloud application platform available as a PaaS for enterprises in an open and hybrid cloud.
Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat said that many current PaaS offerings weren’t able to “the full needs of the enterprise.”
“However someone wants to build and manage their applications, they should be able to. With the PaaS roadmap and strategy we are outlining today, we’re paving the way for enterprises to use a Red Hat-powered open cloud application platform to build and run their applications, however best fits their business needs,” he added.
Jay Lyman, senior analyst at analyst firm 451 Research said that he expected the enterprise PaaS market to be worth more than $3 billion by 2015.
“It is still early days for PaaS offerings, combinations and support,” said Lyman. “That's why it is critical that the underlying components and supported pieces of PaaS are open, flexible and available the way customers and developers want them, which is typically in the cloud, on-premises or both.”
