Red Hat Expands Partnerships With Google Cloud, SAP, Oracle

‘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,’ Stefanie Chiras, Red Hat’s channel chief, tells CRN.

In time for Red Hat’s sales kickoff event this week, the open-source tool vendor unveiled deeper partnerships with SAP, Google Cloud and Oracle.

Red Hat channel chief Stefanie Chiras, the Raleigh, N.C.-based vendor’s senior vice president of partner ecosystem success, told CRN that the deeper vendor partnerships reflect Red Hat’s goal of creating more capabilities and realizing the value of those capabilities for partners to deliver to customers.

“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,” Chiras said. “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 Inks Partnerships With Oracle, Google, SAP

Red Hat Thursday unveiled the availability of a self-managed Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud Marketplace.

On Wednesday, Red Hat announced an expanded partnership with SAP to increase the Germany-based enterprise application giant’s use of and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat and Oracle Tuesday launched a multistage alliance that has RHEL running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as a supported operating system.

Art Quinn, a general manager at Perficient, a St. Louis-based partner of all four of the vendors and No. 51 on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500, told CRN that vendors forming deeper partnerships is good for services-led partners who have to move workloads to the cloud.

“Unless you’re moving workloads, you’re not playing in the cloud space,” Quinn said. “You’re not using these tools. And so people with a tighter relationship to the end business customer—whether that be marketing, whether that be commerce or what have you—are perfect partners to hang out with.”

James Chinn, CEO of Shadow-Soft, an Atlanta-based Red Hat partner, told CRN that customers with Oracle stacks have been demanding his company’s business more recently, making the partnership between the two vendors helpful for his work.

“Seeing them take that extra step to work together more than they have in the past and us having already several engagements under our belt around it, it’s a big deal for us,” Chinn said.

Red Hat Ansible And Google Cloud

Making Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform available on Google Cloud Marketplace should help customers simplify self-deployments, according to Red Hat.

Google customers can access preintegrated services such as Google Compute and Google Virtual Private Cloud. They also have access to packaged cloud content such as Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for automation across an organization. The collection allows users to make, share and manage content and run it whenever and wherever needed, according to Red Hat.

Plus, customers can count the platform toward their existing committed spend agreements with Google—an important benefit as customers tighten IT budgets in anticipation for a possible recession in the U.S.

“Customers have pivoted—it’s more than just picking a vendor,” Chiras said. “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.”

Chiras said that Ansible is now available as a self-managed offering for the three most popular cloud infrastructure offerings—Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“A marketplace is an incredibly important way of procuring for customers,” she said.

Other Red Hat offerings on Google Cloud Marketplace include RHEL, RHEL for SAP and Red Hat OpenShift, according to Red Hat.

Automation is also one of the major technological investment areas for Red Hat parent company IBM. The Armonk, N.Y.-based vendor’s chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, predicted during the company’s latest quarterly earnings that even customers that are especially susceptible to economic headwinds are going to seek automation services to “emerge stronger” once inflation is under control.

Red Hat And SAP

For SAP, the vendor is migrating part of its internal IT landscape and the SAP Enterprise Cloud Services portfolio onto the standard RHEL foundation, according to Red Hat.

RHEL is now the preferred OS for net-new business for deployments with Rise with SAP, which combines cloud ERP, business process intelligence and other services.

Throughout 2023, Red Hat and SAP will add more support for Rise with SAP workloads on RHEL and accelerate SAP’s broader RHEL adoption, according to Red Hat. As part of the partnership, Red Hat has dedicated product engineers and on-site resources to help SAP engineering and technical teams standardize on RHEL.

The partnership should bring more capabilities to the partner ecosystems of both SAP and Red Hat, Chiras told CRN.

Red Hat supports “the migration of business into the cloud,” Chiras told CRN. “We see partners like SAP taking customers on that journey and to Rise. 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.”

In a statement, Lalit Patil, SAP’s CTO for enterprise cloud services, said that he looks “forward to building on our legacy of innovation together with Red Hat to empower our customers with greater flexibility and resilience across cloud environments.”

Last year, IBM became a premium supplier for the Rise with SAP and unveiled a “Breakthrough with IBM for Rise with SAP” portfolio of consulting services meant to help accelerate customers’ move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Red Hat And Oracle

And as part of the new alliance with Oracle, OCI users can standardize cloud operations with RHEL for a common platform, according to Red Hat.

Certified OCI flexible virtual machine configurations can run RHEL and customers can use either vendor to resolve issues. RHEL is initially supported on the most recent OCI virtual machine shapes using AMD, Intel and Arm processors, according to Red Hat.

Red Hat is also working on certifying RHEL for OCI bare-metal servers for more isolation and performance.

“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,” Clay Magouyrk, Oracle’s executive vice president for OCI, said in a statement. “Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility.”