• Red Hat Summit in Boston has sees Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 launched
• Plus Microsoft coming to the Red Hat party with Azure Red Hat OpenShift
• Claims Azure Red Hat OpenShift combines the innovation of enterprise Kubernetes with the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform

Red Hat has been kicking up its heels this week as the open source specialist makes a slew of announcements at its Red Hat Summit in Boston. Things are looking good and Red Hat is using its Summit to highlight the impact it’s Enterprise Linux has had on the Enterprise space - commissioning a report from IDC to size the value.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 7 was launched back in 2014 and the company claims the arrival  of Enterprise Linux 8 has been much anticipated. It’s key selling point is its ability to “support any application, any environment, anywhere,” claims Red Hat, a boast which has served it well as enterprise users adopt ‘hybrid’ cloud strategies. Likewise it claims every application and hardware configuration is tested and certified to work effectively in a hybrid set-up.

Red Hat says Enterprise Linux is available across a vast array of infrastructure service providers -  from the largest global public cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to regional and specialized cloud and managed service providers. More than 1,000 Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their cloud infrastructures. (see - Red Hat Amplifies Enterprise Linux Across the Hybrid Cloud with the IT Industry’s Largest Commercial Open Source Software Ecosystem).

Trillions

IDC has been totting up the impact Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been having on the global economy. It reckons applications running on Enterprise Linux are expected to contribute to more than $10 trillion worth of global business revenues in 2019, powering roughly 5% of the worldwide economy as a cross-industry technology foundation.

This has created hundreds of thousands of jobs and and, IDC calculates, has contributed economic benefits of more than $1 trillion each year through increased revenues or decreased expenses. (see - New Research Expects Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Impact $10 Trillion of Global Business Revenues, Employ 900,000 IT Professionals in 2019)

"The operating system is at the heart of every modern enterprise and powers a wide range of crucial business activities, from running globe-spanning ERP systems to forming the foundation of massive IT infrastructure,” observes Cushing Anderson, program vice president, Business Consulting and IT Education at IDC. “As the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux fuels these operations and more... opening tens of billions of dollars in opportunities to ecosystem partners."

OpenShift

Also announced at the Red Hat Summit was the general availability of Azure Red Hat OpenShift. This brings a jointly-managed enterprise-grade Kubernetes solution to a leading public cloud, Microsoft Azure.  (see - Red Hat and Microsoft Fuel Hybrid Cloud Development with Azure Red Hat OpenShift).

Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides an on-ramp to hybrid cloud computing, enabling IT organizations to use Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in their datacenters and more seamlessly extend these workloads to use the power and scale of Azure services. It marks the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the public cloud.

"Hybrid cloud provides a clear vision into the future of enterprise computing, where public cloud services stand alongside virtualization, Linux containers and bare-metal servers,” comments Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. “Together, this forms the new datacenter in the hybrid cloud world. Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent Kubernetes foundation for enterprises to realize the benefits of this hybrid cloud model. This enables IT leaders to innovate with a platform that offers a common fabric for both app developers and operations."