Red Hat Updates Present ‘Huge’ Partner Opportunities in OpenShift, Edge

Partners should see 'a huge opportunity with OpenShift virtualization,' especially with continued frustrations over price changes at rival VMware, said Kirsten Newcomer, Red Hat’s senior director of hybrid cloud platforms.

Updates to Red Hat OpenShift, OpenShift AI, Edge Device and Developer Hub should offer partners more ways to do business with customers, executives with the open source tools vendor and IBM subsidiary tell CRN.

Improved capabilities around virtualization in OpenShift, more model training support in OpenShift AI, better abilities for low latency in Edge Device and new artificial intelligence templates in Developer Hub are some of the biggest news the Raleigh, N.C.-based vendor dropped during the annual KubeCon event, which runs through Friday in Salt Lake City.

In response to a question from CRN during a virtual press conference, Kirsten Newcomer, Red Hat’s senior director of hybrid cloud platforms, said partners should see “a huge opportunity with OpenShift virtualization,” especially with continued frustrations over price changes at rival VMware.

She encouraged partners to look at Red Hat’s migration toolkit for moving VMware workloads to Red Hat and talking to customers about other ways to modernize applications and enabling apps to run in the cloud through OpenShift or even on-premises through OpenShift.

Red Hat KubeCon 2024

“It’s just a huge opportunity for SIs, consultancies to help customers make that migration and help the teams who are responsible for OpenShift, the teams responsible for the apps running in VMs, help them to adopt this environment, become comfortable with it, become familiar,” Newcomer said. “It really sets an organization on a path that improves their ability to modernize their applications because they can become familiar with the environment even if they're not yet ready to move into microservices or other types of more modern applications.”

In CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs, Red Hat said that about 80 percent of overall sales come through indirect channel and alliance relationships and that it expected the number of channel partners it works with to increase within the next 12 months.

One of the marquee announcements from Red Hat at KubeCon 2024 was general availability (GA) of OpenShift 4.17. This version improves on safe memory oversubscription for virtual machines and gives users a technology preview of storage live migration between devices and classes while a VM runs, according to Red Hat.

Also in technology preview is native network isolation for namespaces and a confidential compute attestation operator for improving data protection and security.

Red Hat also revealed that its OpenShift Lightspeed AI-powered virtual assistant has been moved to technology preview.

Red Hat OpenShift AI

Red Hat OpenShift AI 2.15 will become generally available later this month, according to the vendor.

Released last year, OpenShift AI supports model development, training, serving, automation and other predictive and generative AI use cases. Part of the updates include a technology preview of a model registry to manage versions, metadata and model artifacts and detection tools for data drift and bias.

The new OpenShift AI also supports Nvidia Nim microservices and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) graphics processing units (GPUs), according to Red Hat.

Jeff DeMoss, Red Hat’s director of AI product management, added on the call that solution providers should see “tremendous opportunities” developing domain- and industry-specific offers through OpenShift AI.

“They can leverage their knowledge in a specific domain or industry, and instead of just having generic use cases,” DeMoss said. “They can solve more packaged use cases and patterns that they're seeing that are unique to specific verticals.”

Red Hat Device Edge

Red Hat’s version 4.17 of Device Edge includes new low latency and near-real-time capabilities to appeal to use cases from autonomous vehicles to industrial settings.

In response to a question from CRN during a virtual press conference, Shobhan Lakkapragada, Red Hat’s senior director of product management for Edge, called edge a “big opportunity area that consultants, global system integrators can play a big role (in) because there's a lot of industry-specific transformation, industry-specific knowledge that our SI partners and MSPs, even, can bring.”

“We are very much interested in partnering with SIs and consultants to expand into this new market,” Lakkapragada said. “We are relatively new in this space. I would say, a few years. So a lot of the end customers in this space are lines-of-business decision-makers. And they're seeing all the transformation that is happening in the IT world. And they want to bring the same thing to operations technology. This is where SIs can play a big role in helping end customers do that transformation.”

Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat made five new templates focused on common AI use cases available in its Developer Hub offer: audio-to-text, chatbot, code generation, object detection and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) chatbot.

Developer Hub, launched this year, has more than 20,000 developers on the platform, according to Red Hat.

In response to a question from CRN during a virtual press conference, Balaji Sivasubramanian, Red Hat senior director of Developer Tools, said that Developer Hub is “a great play for our value-added or or services partners” and “absolutely, it's a great opportunity,” especially when it comes to customer AI adoption and increasing developer productivity.

“Deloitte, they are actually taking on Developer Hub not only for their internal use case–internal developers themselves–but also they are offering solutions based on Developer Hub to their end customers,” Sivasubramanian said.

Developer Hub’s high level of customization for internal developer portals within enterprises creates “a tremendous opportunity for these value-added services, SI partners to be able to take it and offer the customer and customize for the use case,” he said. “I see a lot of partners already lined up to take our product and market it.”

Neural Magic Acquisition

During KubeCon, Red Hat also revealed that it had signed an agreement to buy Neural Magic, a Somerville, Mass.-based upstart that provides software and algorithms for generative AI inference workloads.

Part of Red Hat’s attraction to Neural Magic–spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2018–is the upstart’s leadership in vLLM, an open source project for model serving that supports all key model families and advanced inference acceleration research.

vLLM also supports AMD GPUs, Amazon Web Services’ Neuron, Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), Intel Gaudi, Nvidia GPUs, x86 central processing units (CPUs). And other hardware backends, according to Red Hat.

Although Red Hat did not say when it expects the acquisition to close, the vendor expects partners to benefit.

“With Red Hat and Neural Magic, infrastructure partners powering general computing and AI will be able to better scale AI across platforms and accelerators,” Red Hat said in a statement.

The vendor added that “ISV partners creating valuable solutions to help meet the unique business challenges of today will gain more robust inference and performance to integrate with their offerings” and “OEM partners will be able to take advantage of improved open source infrastructure for GenAI.”