Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an expansion of its cloud ecosystem with the establishment of the OpenShift Partner Program, focused on the Company’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for open source developers announced today.

“We are excited to be part of the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem, and enable PHP developers to get more benefits from the Zend PHP Cloud Platform through the Red Hat OpenShift platform”

OpenShift redefines the rapidly growing $26 billion PaaS market by providing developers a new level of choice in languages, frameworks and clouds to build, test, run and manage their applications. With OpenShift’s open source architecture and open Application Platform Interfaces (APIs), integration with the platform is simpler and third-party solutions can be packaged as pluggable modules called cartridges. Through this open approach, the program is designed to foster a broad, rich partner ecosystem that will be able to address the rapidly changing developer requirements for PaaS better than proprietary offerings. Red Hat brings to PaaS its robust open certified ecosystem available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

“OpenShift offers a unique open, extensible architecture and community-centric approach to PaaS,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. “This enables the growth of a rich, vibrant partner community to help drive innovation and opportunities for both Red Hat Cloud and our broad ecosystem of cloud partners. With the backing of both Red Hat and our partners, we expect OpenShift to become one of the most widely used PaaS platforms on the market.”

“Red Hat OpenShift enables developers to focus on building applications, and dramatically reduces the upfront costs of deploying and scaling these new applications,” said Roger Bodamer, executive vice president, Products and Technology at 10gen. “The MongoDB NoSQL database is well- matched to the scalability and agility that developers demand in the cloud, and by supporting MongoDB in OpenShift, Red Hat has delivered that in an enterprise-ready open source platform.”

“We're thrilled to be the first mobile development platform to be part of OpenShift,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “Our integrated solution will enable developers to build and manage their mobile applications on Red Hat-certified clouds.”

“We are excited to be partnering with Red Hat to enable developers to quickly deploy their favorite open source applications to the OpenShift platform. Our BitNami-packaged applications give developers a head start so they can be productive with the OpenShift platform in minutes,” said Erica Brescia, CEO at BitRock, developer of BitNami.

“At Cotendo we are obsessed with speed. We are excited to be the CDN and Site acceleration partner as part of Red Hat’s OpenShift ecosystem helping developers accelerate and scale their applications with demand,” said Ronni Zehavi, CEO at Cotendo.

“With the OpenShift platform, Red Hat has created a uniquely attractive PaaS offering that pairs choice with unified simplicity. Couch and memcached are two of the most prevalent open source data management technologies on the web, and Couchbase is excited to deliver them as OpenShift cartridges, joining other leading open source technologies,” said James Phillips, Co-founder at Couchbase.

"Dyn is very excited to be serving the Red Hat developer community with rock-solid, enterprise DNS and email delivery solutions for the OpenShift platform,” said Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO at Dyn. “As an official launch partner, we look forward to continuing our support for the open source community, as we have for more than 10 years."

“EnterpriseDB is proud to be part of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, and is pleased to provide the open source developer with an enterprise-class, Oracle-compatible cloud database built and maintained through the proven open source development model,” said Ed Boyajin, CEO at EnterpriseDB.

"eXo is pleased to expand our partnership with Red Hat to OpenShift. Our eXo Cloud Services provide a natural onramp for developers to OpenShift, offering an enhanced PaaS experience with the addition of rich social and collaborative development services,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO at eXo.

“We are excited to be the provider of application scalability and performance testing for Red Hat's OpenShift platform,” said Kowsik Guruswamy, CTO and Co-founder at Mu Dynamics. “With open source making cloud deployments incredibly agile, blitz.io from Mu Dynamics helps scale these apps by bringing load and performance testing into the development cycle to deliver a better user experience while simultaneously speeding time to deployment.”

“By integrating our python-based product with the OpenShift platform, our clients can now benefit from a ready-made, enterprise-class environment for their custom solutions,” said Sushil Prabhu, CEO at OpenCrowd.

“Enterprise-ready development platforms that are based on open standards are a key driver of the adoption of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and one of the fastest growing uses of the cloud,” said John Rowell, CTO at OpSource. “Being a Red Hat OpenShift partner provides OpSource customers and our partners with access to a platform and a trusted open source community to accelerate the development of enterprise-class applications in the cloud.”

“We are excited to be part of the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem, and enable PHP developers to get more benefits from the Zend PHP Cloud Platform through the Red Hat OpenShift platform,” said Andi Gutmans, CEO and Co-founder at Zend Technologies.

To learn more about the Red Hat Cloud partner ecosystem, visit the Cloud Pavilion at the Red Hat Summit taking place in Boston, May 3-6, 2011, or visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/partners/.

To learn more about OpenShift, visit http://openshift.redhat.com.