14 DAY TRIAL // The Red Hat Summit is currently in full swing and every day, it announces more interesting products and initiatives. The latest announcement, brought in by Matt Maddox, Director of Online Services, spoke about the official launch of the Red Hat Exchange service. The Red Hat Exchange (RHX for short) service was first announced at the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and addresses all interested in enterprise-level services and applications.
RHX is intended as an online service based on the Red Hat Network (RHN) technology. It gathers almost 14 companies, for now, from the enterprise software domain, among which Zimbra, MySQL, Compiere, Alfresco, Pentaho or Zenoss. These companies will provide free trials, but also property downloadable software to which users can post their reviews regarding a specific product or supply feedback. The applications will be delivered and installed on the clients' machines through RHN. By this project, Red Hat becomes trusted-source and support point, up to a certain level, for all the products posted by the 14 companies. The companies involved in this initiative claim that, besides the honor of working with such a big player on the enterprise Linux domain, this also represents an important step in the deployment of their applications; once a large company such as Red Hat is taking care of the sales, they can focus on the coding and development.
"Being selected for Red Hat Exchange opens the door to a huge market that has a proven appetite for the benefits of innovation and collaboration that Zimbra brings to the table. Red Hat's broad reach and installed base of hundreds of thousands of customers is a great market for the Zimbra solution" stated Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra CEO and co-founder.