Open-source giant Red Hat launches first blockchain initiative

Red Hat today officially unveiled its OpenShift Blockchain Initiative, an effort designed to help financial firms embrace proofs of concepts and experiments with emerging technologies.

Under the OpenShift Blockchain initiative, Red Hat customers will benefit from Red Hat’s managed support services and be able to build blockchain-hosted applications using tools from independent solutions vendors (ISVs).

In a press interview, Julio Tapia, director of Red Hat OpenShift partner ecosystem, stated on his side that the company wants to leverage its open source experience in the blockchain market following news in February that the company had joined the Hyperledger blockchain project.

Tapia told CoinDesk:

“We want to not only stand with our customers and partners, but we want to be able to leverage solutions from the entire ecosystem; to leverage all the innovations in the industry, mature them for the market, and ensure that all solutions are available and supported.”

He believes that through this initiative, all customers will have access to OpenShift proprietary products as well as tools, training sessions, startup materials and services provided by third-party solution providers.

Tapia pointed out that Red Hat’s products are very competitive in the current market because major financial institutions have expressed interest in launching blockchain applications on cloud platforms.

“People in the market want to be able to deploy on the big cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft,” Tapia explained. “There are a lot of companies that are providing cloud support.”

Moreover, there are OpenShift proprietary products on Amazon and Google, and Microsoft Azure platform will soon support this product. If the business unit of an enterprise wants to purchase the right to use these cloud platforms, Red Hat can manage it on behalf of the customer.

Red Hat’s formal entry into the ecosystem comes at a time when a number of startups are trying to offer similar enterprise-oriented services. For example, former Red Hat employee Jeff Garzik recently founded startup Bloq, which he calls “the Red Hat of blockchain” for its managed software services marketplace approach.

In mid-March, it was reported that Red Hat, a company known worldwide for its open source Linux operating system services, had an annual revenue of $2 billion.

Rising attention

Tapia said Red Hat is expanding its OpenShift initiative as a blockchain feature in part because of the growing interest in the technology.

“We’ve heard a lot about companies deploying new solutions to address needs in this area, and we want to make sure we’re ahead of the curve with this move,” continued Tapia.

As for his predictions for the market, Tapia was coy, saying only that he believes the industry is “still a work in progress.”

“We see a lot of interesting use cases being developed, covering everything from naming to registration to patent management.”

Tapia seemed to be hinting that Red Hat has been preparing to make more progress in this area.

"That's how the big markets come out, and we want to be the default platform for the market through a prudent investment approach."

No restrictions

Red Hat announced in February that it would incorporate BlockApps, a product developed by Ethereum decentralized application center ConsenSys, into OpenShift.

Tapia said BlockApps was included because ConsenSys, its parent company and seed investor, was one of the first organizations to express a desire for potential collaboration with Red Hat. And the company is not the only one to be accepted into the project.

Tapia did not provide further details on which other blockchain companies have joined OpenShift.

He said: "It's a bit early to say now, many partners are still in product development."

As for the level of scrutiny, Tapia declined to specify specific standards that any participant in the system would need to meet. Given Microsoft's approach to expanding the Azure platform, Tapia said Red Hat will strive to be inclusive and open, and will not make it too difficult for companies to join.

"We don't have any specific hard requirements, and it's too early to say anything at the moment."