In addition to the public offering, there is also a private offering for companies to have greater control and personalization. This feature is ideal for great efficiency and scaling the software to meet the requirements of the company that are pre-approved by IBM. It also allows for organizations to track usage and spending across multiple clouds and departments. The Red Hat Marketplace is designed to be a single source where organizations can evaluate, purchase and deploy software. Software is certified for Open Shift and built with Kubernetes operators to ease upgrades, logging and scaling.

The Kubernetes add-ons available include storage, monitoring and database offerings. The availability of these add-ons will allow organizations to provision and deploy cloud native applications immediately as required. All Red Hat Marketplace products are certified for Red Hat Open Shift and include support. Open Shift is a layered system that uses Kubernetes and Docker to manage containers through orchestration across multiple hosts.

There are two perspectives that can be access from the dashboard and those perspectives are Developer and Administrator. Developers can create and access instances. The usage data is reported to the cluster administrator. The developer perspective does not include installs or application usage tracking, but the administrator perspective does include these features. Metering is enabled for all software and gives immediate information about usage and budgeting. This is especially helpful for accounting and software auditing.

IBM presented an estimate that around 20 percent of eligible workloads have completely migrated to the cloud. The remaining percentage still rely on private on-premise data centers and colocation facilities. Companies want to access container technology to migrate those remaining workloads to the cloud and Red Hat Marketplace makes this transition easier and more manageable. This is especially true for multi-cloud requirements and the practical trend for most organizations will be multi-cloud environments.

The target markets for Red Hat Marketplace include organizations who want to extend their cloud outreach and consultancies who assist organizations with modernizing their infrastructure. The model is in sharp contrast to a channel partner arrangement and will eliminate the need for traditional purchasing agreements. Lars Herrmann, Senior Director, Technology Partnerships, Red Hat states, “We believe that removing the operational barriers to deploy and manage new tools and technologies can help organizations become more agile in hybrid multicloud environments. The software available on Red Hat Marketplace is tested, certified and supported on Red Hat Open Shift to enable built-in management logic and streamline implementation processes. This helps customers run faster with automated deployments, while enjoying the improved scalability, security, and orchestration capabilities of Kubernetes-native infrastructure.”