We see dramatically increased interest in leveraging cloud computing to develop and deploy applications.  Hence today's announcement of our Red Hat Cloud Foundations Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) strategy and launch of our PaaS Solution Center. Red Hat PaaS is part of Red Hat Cloud Foundations with an overarching announcement - Red Hat Cloud Foundations Centers on Portability and Interoperability, Garners Broad Industry Support today.

While it is early days for this new market and opportunity, some leading JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers are building extensions to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, delivering a custom PaaS into IT. We see customers pursuing the benefits of more controlled application lifecycle management and elasticity within their IT deployments today! We can help with Red Hat Consulting Services and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, so an enterprise can capture the benefits of a complete middleware reference architecture in the cloud, now!

Red Hat PaaS will deliver open choice development and deployment of applications in its initial instantiation. We describe this in detail in our Red Hat PaaS paper. Red Hat PaaS will deliver the greatest choice of application development models and languages and deployment options of any offering – develop any way, deploy anywhere with Portable Clouds.

But now that you have a cloud application strategy and development underway, how will you integrate these existing or new applications deployed to a choice of clouds into your business processes and value chain?  Enterprises, partners and vendors are discovering that you must have a good application and integration architecture laid out to fully capture the benefits of cloud computing. This means, amongst other things, defining clean and clear interfaces to be used as integration points, essentially designing and deploying your applications into an SOA. By publishing clearly understood and documented integration points, applications deployed on a PaaS in the cloud may be much more easily integrated into on-premise and other cloud applications and business processes.

We discussed the integration requirement and opportunity for greater IT and business productivity with respect to cloud-based applications at JBossWorld 2010 in my presentation SOA - Maximizing Value of Cloud & On-Premise Applications & Services. Today, we see most integration fabric deployments being deployed on-premise and integrating applications and services in the cloud, across other clouds, and on-premise into flexible, agile business processes. Red Hat can deliver on this promise today with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform in a cost-effective, open manner using a software subscription that has much greater affinity with cloud business and pricing models than licensed software.

Over time, we will see some of these integration fabrics deployed with the applications in the cloud and across heterogeneous clouds. Today, some early adopters are taking JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform into the cloud and building a custom PaaS integration fabric that delivers the benefits of SOA, open source, and PaaS cloud computing in one deployment! Over time, Red Hat PaaS will add integration services in the box that will be configurable on demand delivering the benefits of PaaS and SOA together in a highly productive, cost-effective package that enables the widest choice of development and integration models as well as deployment options in the industry.

We look forward to discussing our PaaS strategy with you and helping you to realize the benefits of an integrated IT infrastructure based on sound architectural principles using SOA and cloud computing.