Red Hat Helps Startups Flourish With OpenShift Startup Program

Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, has launched a free progam that uses OpenShift Online, Red Hat’s public cloud application and development platform, to help startups build and grow their business.

With the OpenShift Startup Program, startups can take advantage of the benefits of a hosted cloud environment to launch their startup with less cost, more reliability, more flexibility, and quicker product iteration, Red Hat said. Members will have access to OpenShift Online subscription benefits for development, testing, quality assurance, and production hosting. This includes award-winning Red Hat support and no software or program lock-in. As the startups grow their service, they have the option to move their service on-premise or on to their customers’ private clouds powered by OpenShift Enterprise.

Networking opportunities

Additionally, the OpenShift Startup Program is said to offer valuable networking opportunities. Select OpenShift Startup Program participants have the opportunity be introduced to prospective clients, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 customers.

Additional OpenShift Startup Program benefits include:
· OpenShift promotional credit, enabling startups to launch their ideas
· Consultative support via Red Hat’s OpenShift operations and marketing teams
· Access to Red Hat’s award-winning Customer Experience and Engagement team
· Migration of service from public cloud to private cloud and on-premise installations
· Joint marketing and feature placement on OpenShift Marketplace for relevant services

Since its introduction, OpenShift Online has provided developers a cloud application platform with a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to enhance an enterprise’s ability to build the applications it needs and have them run in a cloud architecture. OpenShift also provides a standardised and streamlined developer workflow to provision quickly, build efficiently and get apps to market faster – a necessity for organizations trying to scale their businesses.

Privately-held software startups developing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based product can apply for the OpenShift Startup Program here.

Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat, said: “The average startup is moving at a fast and furious pace to get their business off the ground, but often gets bogged down in managing operations. By moving development into a hosted cloud solution – especially one with a free hosted tier like OpenShift – many of the typical server infrastructure pain points can be avoided. We want to make it easy for startups to benefit from the cloud, just as we do with our enterprise customers. That’s why we created the OpenShift Startup Program – to support software startups and increase their chance of success by providing them with an application hosting infrastructure at a reasonable cost.”

Adam Klein, chief strategist, American Underground, said: “We are excited to be working with OpenShift Startup program to provide innovative new startups special access to the OpenShift PaaS. Collaborating with Red Hat on OpenShift will enable our startups to focus on their code via the benefits of PaaS. The wide variety of the choice, flexibility, and accessibility of programming languages offered by OpenShift Online will benefit both consumer and BtoB startups.”

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