Red Hat doubles down on enterprise PaaS

Red Hat, Inc. has outlined the next phase of its strategy for delivering one of the industry’s first comprehensive, open, and unified Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings. Red Hat JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift by Red Hat provide a rich set of enterprise application, integration and business process automation capabilities and services in an extensible open PaaS platform, and is uniquely positioned to enable accelerated development and deployment of next-generation enterprise applications and business processes in the cloud.

Red Hat’s vision is to expand the availability of its technologies as services on OpenShift, widening the pathway for enterprises and developers to create, integrate and manage applications and business processes in the cloud. The initial phase of Red Hat’s PaaS strategy was marked by the introduction of OpenShift Enterprise, which combined the core enterprise technologies that power OpenShift, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, into an integrated open hybrid cloud application platform, followed by the commercial availability of OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public PaaS offering.

The PaaS market is maturing beyond basic application container services to increasingly specialized services. In a 2012 report, industry analyst firm Gartner identified 11 distinct segments that make up the PaaS market; however, these services often continue to be offered in isolation from one another by technology providers, and efforts to tie the services together have been slow to emerge. Today’s enterprise applications are highly distributed across disparate infrastructures and integrate both complex processes and numerous data sources, requiring easier, more nimble integration and a more unified approach to higher-level services than what has traditionally been available.

The next phase of Red Hat's PaaS strategy focuses on the delivery of key additional Red Hat JBoss Middleware technologies in the cloud as services powered by OpenShift, including integration capabilities, business process management (BPM), and mobile push notifications. The mobile push notification service is available today in developer preview and will be followed by developer preview versions of integration PaaS (iPaaS) and BPM PaaS (bpmPaaS) technologies in the coming months. This iPaaS technology will expand on pre-cloud messaging-based integration to include cloud-based configuration, cloud-based brokers, and cloud-based services, and the bpmPaaS capabilities are slated to include process modeling, business activity monitoring (BAM), process simulation, and the ability to dynamically configure automation and data without changing code.

Development for xPaaS can be initiated today with Red Hat JBoss Middleware products, including Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat JBoss BRMS, which have been built with the cloud as a target development and deployment platform. As new xPaaS services are delivered, users will be able to easily move new applications, integrations and process components into the PaaS environment. Over time, Red Hat plans to add services and capabilities from the rest of its Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio along with other Red Hat technologies incorporated as xPaaS services.

Red Hat’s PaaS offerings already enable next-generation application development for open hybrid cloud. As more enterprises move to adopt PaaS, they will be looking for more enterprise application, integration and business process services in order to move new and existing enterprise applications to the cloud. As one of the few companies today that is able to combine enterprise-grade middleware, a proven PaaS platform, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and the full spectrum of capabilities needed to address modern application requirements, Red Hat is well-positioned to help its customers meet the current and future demands of enterprise computing.