14 Partners Join Red Hat’s Online Store
The VAR Guy was on the mark again: As he expected, Red Hat today launched an online store featuring 14 open source software providers. In theory, the Red Hat Exchange could allow the company to become a central online market place for open source applications. The first software companies to support the online store include…
Alfresco, CentricCRM, Compiere, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Jive, MySQL, Pentaho, Scalix, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda.
For VARs, Red Hat’s online exchange provides a single shopping cart for buying multiple applications. Critics may claim that the online exchange allows customers to bypass VARs and buy directly from Red Hat and its software partners. But let’s be honest here, folks: Online application sales, on-demand technoology, and software as a service (SaaS) will soon be the norms within corporate computing.
Red Hat either had to lead the charge or get left behind.