Red Hat today announced that it is replacing its existing Certified Cloud Provider Program with a new global program that is being more broadly applied to a much larger group of partners.

Rather than being specifically focused on cloud service providers, the new Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program has been expanded to include distributors, managed service providers and other partners involved in public, private and hybrid cloud computing services.

Jane Circle, manager for certified cloud provider and cloud access programs at Red Hat, said the goal is to provide a consistent level of customer experience regardless of where a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image is actually being served up in a cloud computing environment. To that end, Red Hat has developed a script that runs a series of tests on those images before they can be certified by Red Hat.

In addition, Red Hat has also extended the certification program to include cloud implementations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA, OpenShift by Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat Gluster Storage.

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Red Hat partners, said Circle, will have the option of delivering customer support themselves or calling on Red Hat to provide that support. Partners that decide to provide support must have at least two engineers on staff that are certified in RHEL. Other partners can opt to act as an intermediary between their customers and the support provided by Red Hat.

Circle said it takes Red Hat on average 24 hours to certify an image and partners that fail to have their images certified will receive feedback on what they need to do to get their images certified. Beyond the usual blood, sweat and tears associated with building and certifying images, Circle said Red Hat will not charge partners for certifying their images.

Like many vendors, Red Hat is trying to use certifications to not only ensure a consistent customer experience, but also reduce the number of support calls it might have to service. Naturally, the puts a little extra onus on the partners to make sure they can pass those compliance tests. At the same time, however, it’s as much in their interest to have a third-party validate those images before there is an issue with the customer that winds up costing both them and Red Hat time and money.