Analyzing the Microsoft/Red Hat open-source partnership – Business

Technology alliances aren’t new in enterprise technology. However, Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. have forged an unlikely partnership set to reshape the landscape of cloud computing and open-source technology.

“First, these are two industry leaders worldwide,” said João Couto (pictured), EMEA vice president and chief operating officer of cloud commercial solutions at Microsoft. “If you think about the Fortune 500 customers, as an example, 95% of them use Microsoft technology and 90% of them use Red Hat solutions. So, it makes a ton of sense for us to collaborate and deliver more value to our customers. In this context, we have also been working very diligently together to promote open source, so it’s not like something completely weird to do.”

Couto spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rebecca Knight and Paul Gillin at Red Hat Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the Microsoft/Red Hat partnership’s transformative value for enterprises and the larger open-source community. (* Disclosure below.)

Dissecting Microsoft and Red Hat’s open-source partnership for enterprises with Microsoft’s João Couto.

A platform for co-developed solutions driving customer value

Value delivery is the end goal of any solutions partnership. In this case, Microsoft and Red Hat have created several avenues to create customer value. First, their collective open-source capabilities will lead to co-developed solutions to simplify the modernization and migration of Red Hat technologies to the cloud, seamlessly integrating them with Microsoft’s Azure platform, according to Couto.

“We have acquired GitHub, which is also one of the largest repositories of open source worldwide,” he said. “In that context, it makes a lot of sense to work together with Red Hat. We’re also leveraging the entire portfolio of Red Hat automation tools so that we can make it easier for customers not just to do the migration, but also to the management and all the troubleshooting from a customer care perspective. That’s basically an end-to-end partnership approach that we are taking.”

The partnership offers commercial benefits, such as using Microsoft commitments to purchase Red Hat solutions from Azure Marketplace, and significant cost savings through reserved instance purchases, Couto pointed out.

“The vast majority of our enterprise customers have Microsoft cloud commitments, and with this partnership with Red Hat, they can actually use these commitments and use our marketplace to buy the solutions that they want to buy from Red Hat — [whether] totally new, or existing solutions,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Red Hat Summit: 

(* Disclosure: Microsoft Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Microsoft nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE