Red Hat and Hyperic joined to form an open-source project for developing a core set of IT infrastructure management capabilities. The project bears the name "RHQ", and its source code will be available under GPL v2.

At the beginning of 2005, JBoss and Hyperic entered a collaborative OEM agreement, that allowed the JBoss team to create the JBoss Operations Network from the 2.x Hyperic product line. Since then, JBoss was bought by Red Hat, and Hyperic moved into a complete open source business model.

Katrinka McCallum, vice president in Red Hat's management solutions business unit, stated: "The fact Hyperic has an established name around open source is giving us a kick-start. I don't think it will be that hard because a lot of customers have been asking us to open source our management assets."

RHQ will be a set of services such as for reporting, security and agents, which could be then built into various product offerings. The companies plan to use RHQ in future versions of their products, like JBoss Operations Network 2.0, which will be shipped later this year.

Doug MacEachern, Hyperic's chief technology officer, said: "We're really looking at saving some money when it comes to collaborating on the core platform. I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities to upsell in both directions. JBoss might need coverage in other areas, whereas otherwise our customers might be looking to go deeper into the JBoss stack."

It seems that this could be a part of Jim Whitehurst's - the new CEO from Red Hat - ambitious growth plan for the company. He is aiming to get Red Hat's revenue in the next three years to more than $1 billion, one of the most ambitious plans for an open source enterprise. Red Hat might rely more on middleware and virtualization than on their already successful Red Hat Enterprise Linux product.