Red Hat Launches Catalyst Program to Spur Ecosystem Collaboration

Red Hat on Sept. 1 announced the North American launch of its Red Hat Catalyst Program that will "include an interactive Web portal to facilitate the formation of a community around Red Hat's entire partner ecosystem."

The company continued in a statement, "The goal of the Red Hat-sponsored partner community is to facilitate the creation, collaboration and delivery of open-source solutions based on Red Hat's portfolio." Red Hat announced the Catalyst program launch at the Red Hat Summit, in Chicago. According to the statement:

A fast-growing community of partners, resellers, system integrators, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors are collaborating to bring a full open source solution set to customers. The Catalyst Program will formalize this process, encouraging and reinforcing the entire partner ecosystem.

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"Industry reports estimate the total ecosystem [spending] around open source to be more than $30 billion and growing; this includes hardware, software and services," Roger Egan, head of North American Channel Sales at Red Hat, said in the statement. "There is no doubt that partners with an open-source business practice are positioning themselves to take advantage of this market opportunity. The Catalyst program is designed to help our entire ecosystem leverage this business opportunity and deliver greater value to customers through solutions built on Red Hat technologies."

The statement continued:

Many Red Hat partners are finding innovative ways to create total solutions built on open source. Early this year, Vizuri, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and Preferred JBoss Certified Systems Integrator, committed to delivering an innovative hosting solution to Ecommerce Inc., a global web hosting and ecommerce services provider.

Vizuri worked collaboratively with Red Hat and Ecommerce to develop Imperia, a cloud-based Intelligent Data Center web hosting platform that aims to increase customer service, reduce customer turnover, reduce operational costs, and increase customer reliability using Red Hat, JBoss, Hyperic and EnterpriseDB solutions. This type of collaboration is what the Red Hat Catalyst Program is designed to foster throughout the partner ecosystem.

"We've been delivering comprehensive business solutions that utilize open source for quite some time and our customers call on us to leverage many different technologies. Typically we evolve these solutions incrementally, component by component," said Joe Dickman, managing director [at] Vizuri. "The Catalyst Program will enable my team to quickly and efficiently identify certified solutions. The access to marketing and sales assistance will drastically cut my time to delivery."

Initial Catalyst solutions will feature Alfresco, Ingres, EnterpriseDB, Jaspersoft and Pentaho. Each of these ISVs has worked with Red Hat to create solutions based on Red Hat technologies that provide Red Hat partners with new ways to extend the value of Red Hat-based open source solutions to a broader set of customers. Sales and marketing tools for Catalyst Program solutions will be available to partners on the Red Hat North America Partner page.

In the future, the Red Hat Catalyst Program is expected to include a social networking and collaborative web portal to facilitate discussion on innovative solutions developed by Red Hat partners. Additionally, partners are expected to have an opportunity to showcase their own expertise at creating new solution sets built from any combination of Red Hat's 3500-strong ISV catalog.