Google, Amazon Clouds Invade Red Hat Partner Conference

By samdizzy

Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services executives are set to address Red Hat Partner Conference attendees on Jan. 13 in Arizona. No doubt, the keynotes will seek to ensure Linux resellers understand how to move customer workloads into the Google and AWS public clouds, respectively.

There’s also an ironic twist to consider: Red Hat strongly promotes OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, for building public and private clouds. So in some ways Red Hat is helping CSPs (cloud services providers) to compete with Google Cloud Platform and AWS.

Among those expected to speak:

Of course, the Google Cloud and AWS speakers represent competing platforms. I’m curious to see if they take any shots at each other — or perhaps Windows Azure — before pointing out the partner advantages of their respective platforms.

Microsoft is not expected to have a major presence — if any — at the conference. So far, the Windows Azure cloud supports SUSE and several other Linux distributions, but not Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Cloud Partners In Demand

Red Hat generates roughly 60 percent of its revenues from channel partners, most of have on-premises consulting and deployment practives involving Linux, KVM (kernel-based virtual) and Jboss middleware.

But increasingly, Red Hat wants partners that can build hybrid clouds while leveraging technologies such as Red Hat CloudForms (management), OpenShift (on-premises PaaS) and OpenStack (private and hybrid clouds).

How many Red Hat partners will welcome the cloud messaging — particularly from Amazon and Google? Associate blogger CJ Arlotta will be on-site watching and listening for clues.