With new partnership, Red Hat and Microsoft open up the cloud for customers

This morning Microsoft and Red Hat announced an exciting partnership that will help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing and provide greater choice and flexibility for customers who want to deploy Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure.
Openness is essential to our customers and partners and Microsoft continues to invest in delivering an open cloud platform and working with open source communities. From making the full server-side .NET stack open source to offering a fully managed Apache Hadoop service on Linux and hiring open source talent around the world, we’ve engrained openness across the business with great results. In fact, one out of every four Azure virtual machines are Linux today.
By working with Red Hat, we will address key enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across the private and public cloud, including:

• Red Hat solutions available natively to Microsoft Azure customers, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications and workloads, as well as Red Hat application platform offerings. Available in the coming weeks, this includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss middleware platform.
• Integrated enterprise-grade support spanning hybrid environments, with RedHat and Microsoft co-locating support personnel to deliver an end-to-end enterprise support experience for Red Hat offerings on Microsoft Azure that is deeper and richer than any other public cloud offering. This experience will enable enterprises to move their production Red Hat solutions to the public cloud with confidence. Co-locating support will be available in the next few weeks.
• Collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development capabilities, providing access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which will be available within the next few weeks.
• Unified workload management across hybrid cloud deployments, including integration between Red Hat CloudForms, Microsoft Azure, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure. Support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected to be added in the next few months.

Red Hat has already been a great partner in our private cloud, where customers like have FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) IT Services in the UK and Hostway in Korea, are using combinations of Hyper-V, Windows Server, and System Center to run and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads. Today’s announcement allows us to extend this experience to our open public cloud, making it easier for customers to get great stability, performance, and support across their datacenters and the cloud.
More than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft’s cloud today. By offering these new services with Red Hat, we can help even more big businesses move to the cloud on their terms.
As Red Hat’s President Paul Cormier aptly described our partnership, “…our customers are the winners today, as we unite on common solutions to help them solve challenges in this heterogeneous, hybrid world. Together, we’re offering the most comprehensive support agreement for our mixed technologies to support our customers.”
For more on this news, join Paul and Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise, at 8 am PT for a webcast where they will talk more about the announcement and answer your questions. You can also check out the Azure site, the Red Hat Blog, and the Official Microsoft Blog, for more about how this partnership will help customers as they journey to the cloud.