We are pleased to welcome Acquia to Red Hat Exchange (RHX) with the addition of Acquia we are expanding our partner ecosystem in content management. Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. Drupal is a popular social publishing system that blends web content management and social media capabilities with a library of powerful extensions – all supported by a thriving open source community. » Read more

Today, JasperSoft, a leading Open Source Business Intelligence software vendor and a Red Hat Exchange RHX partner, announced that it has secured $12.5 million in venture funding and we are pleased to be a part of that group of investors.

This investment is part of a strategy to help support a thriving open source ecosystem through RHX. Our goal is to present open source solution sets that reach well beyond the OS and solve real problems for customers. Our investment and partnership in JasperSoft will help us achieve that goal by expanding the opportunities for open source software and leveraging the value inherent in all open source solutions.

We congratulate JasperSoft on their continued success and are proud to demonstrate our leadership in the marketplace by serving as an ambassador to open source technologies and by making sound investments in our partners.

The problem—In today’s global business model companies need a way for their employees to efficiently and effectively collaborate, while overcoming the challenges posed by different locations and time zones. Critical project documents often get lost or looked over in busy email in-boxes, creating confusion and inefficient processes across business units.

The solution–Collaboration is at the core of what Red Hat does. We believe we can do things better when we do them with others. So we collaborate with open source communities and customers to create the best Linux distributions. Red Hat Exchange (RHX) works with our open source partners to identify business problems customers are having and collaborates with them to design cost-cutting solutions for those problems. And this time we collaborated on a collaboration solution!

The Alfresco Share / Red Hat Solution is built on the Alfresco enterprise-class document repository and delivers out-of-the-box collaborative content management. It simplifies capturing, sharing, and retrieval of information across virtual teams. Team or project members can rapidly find relevant content, discover source matter experts, view past or similar projects, and keep abreast of relevant changes to increase efficiency. And it all runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The result? An alternative to Microsoft SharePoint and an opportunity to lower costs and achieve freedom from vendor lock-in.

Increasing efficiency while saving money and you don’t have to rip out existing technology — that’s sharing the open source way.

Providing solutions for business problems the open source way — that’s what this case study is all about. Alfresco provides an open source alternative for enterprise content management, which means that enterprises can accelerate collaboration and information sharing using open standards. Open standards allows for choice — a defining attribute of Red Hat solutions.

And because Alfresco is a Red Hat Exchange (RHX) partner, the customer can be confident that the collaborative support relationship between Red Hat and Alfresco will result in world-class service. We’re excited to see customers taking advantage of the value of open source to enable innovation in their specific areas of expertise. To learn more about RHX and find other business solutions, visit http://rhx.redhat.com/.

Making customers successful using open source technologies is the mission of open source software vendors. High quality support is crucial to successful long-term relationships between vendors and their customers. However, support is rarely provided in a vacuum and often involves software outside a vendor’s own catalog. Setting up cooperative support agreements with other vendors is a costly exercise that results in documents that are quickly outdated when contact information or escalation procedures change.

Because Red Hat understands the value of collaborative support, Red Hat’s global support organization created the Cooperative Resolution Center (CRC) using a communication infrastructure managed by a third party non-profit group called TSANet (Technical Support Alliance Network). The CRC aims to improve support experiences for customers using software from multiple vendors by streamlining cooperative support efforts.
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Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has been working with its partners to extend the enterprise open source community by bringing more of our partners’ software into Fedora and EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). Zimbra has long seen the value of making its software easily accessible by the large community of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux users, so it recently leveraged RHX to help get useful community feedback on a license issue.

Earlier this month, Zimbra announced on its forums that in collaboration with Red Hat and the Fedora community, it made a change to the Yahoo! Public License (YPL) Version 1.0 in order to meet Fedora licensing requirements. Red Hat Exchange was an integral part in helping Zimbra advance this initiative.

Here’s the background: To be included in Fedora, software must either have a license certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) (http://www.opensource.org/licenses), or terms that meet the open source definition as outlined by the OSI (http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd). Zimbra is licensed under the YPL which has not yet been submitted for OSI approval. » Read more

Today, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) is welcoming three new partners to the program: Colosa, Inc., Continuent Inc. and Likewise Software. Each of these partners provides applications which broaden the current scope of the RHX software categories. Colosa, Inc., developer of ProcessMaker, brings open source workflow and business process management, while Continuent offers a multi-master approach to database replication. And because today’s IT environments are heterogeneous, we’ve added Likewise, which enables the integration of Linux, UNIX and Mac systems into Microsoft’s Active Directory. Visit rhx.redhat.com to see our new partners and to find other trusted software solutions, powered by open source.
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We are just beyond the first year anniversary of RHX, Red Hat’s program for open source software vendors. Rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. RHX is different now. The team is smaller and the target market is different; but, fundamentally, RHX is smarter. It’s very much alive and is undergoing its third iteration. We’ve learned a lot along the way.

RHX LESSON 1: You don’t fully understand a problem until you try to implement the solution. [1]

The mission of RHX from the start has been to create a rising tide for the broader open source ecosystem. [2] We launched RHX at the May 2007 Summit by offering pre-integrated solution stacks with single-stop web support. RHN powered the delivery of bits. Our goal was to unlock demand in the vast small business market by pricing the solutions competitively and by making installation and support easier. You could even buy RHX solutions online!
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RHX website screenshot. Click to enlarge.

Approaching its one-year anniversary in May, Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has some exciting new updates. We’ve added two new partners already in 2008: Ingres and Hyperic. And, today, RHX will take on a new look with a refresh of the RHX website.

RHX launched last year with the goal of helping Red Hat’s customers engage with the open source ISV ecosystem. During the 11 months since we’ve been in the market, we’ve learned a lot about the best way to meet that goal. In some cases, we learned what didn’t work and made changes to the offering.
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Since launching Red Hat Exchange (RHX) at the Red Hat Summit in May 2007, our team has been busy preparing new products for customers that can be deployed on multiple platforms and that can be purchased with a full range of support tiers. Here’s more information on our new offerings:
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