Red Hat (RHT) is introducing a new incentive for enterprises to adopt its open source OpenStack cloud computing solutions. Now, the company will certify cloud-management solutions for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The certification offering comes as part of Red Hat's OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which the company calls "the world's largest commercial ecosystem for OpenStack." Through the program, Red Hat will provide certifications for integrating channel partners' cloud-management products into RHEL OpenStack.

Red Hat is pitching this initiative as a way for enterprises to take full advantage of the diversity of OpenStack solutions now available on the market without having to commit to a single vendor's offerings. Instead, they will be able to adopt any of a wide range of the certified OpenStack management tools and integrate them into RHEL OpenStack.

The company also hopes the certification, and the integrated OpenStack solutions and partner collaboration that it facilitates, will give it an edge in the increasingly competitive OpenStack market. "As OpenStack is becoming a core element of the enterprise cloud strategy for many customers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is architected and backed by the broadest partner ecosystem to be the preferred platform," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat, in a statement. "The growth and maturity of the ecosystem reflects the evolution of the product moving from addressing infrastructure-centric alignment to help with early deployments to now be well-managed, to be part of enterprise hybrid cloud implementations."

BMC and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), among other partners, are already working with the company toward certification for the new program. The company noted the list of collaborators in its OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network is quite extensive, including "hundreds" of independent hardware vendors and original equipment manufacturers, systems integrators and independent software vendors from all world regions.