Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a collaboration with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), to demonstrate and deliver innovative solutions that maximize the use of open source cloud computing technologies.

Offering security, scalability, interoperability and portability to reduce infrastructure and provide increased capabilities for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), a number of Red Hat solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, systems management technologies, Red Hat CloudForms, and the company’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing platform, will be deployed in SAIC’s new Advanced Computer Engineering (ACE) Laboratory located in North Charleston, S.C., adjacent to SAIC and Red Hat customers.

SAIC’s ACE Laboratory will serve as the foundation for an open community, providing an environment to maximize public and private cooperation focused on solving complex operational and computational problems. The laboratory provides physical and virtual environments for hands-on collaboration between SAIC, other contractors, small businesses, information technology vendors and government employees. Through emerging technology exploration and innovative solution demonstration, the ACE Laboratory aims to foster collaboration and information sharing, promote cloud computing best practices and deliver low-cost, enterprise-scale “create once, optimally manage and reuse often” solutions.

SAIC and Red Hat bring commercial patterns and practices specifically engineered to reduce cost, enable more agile service delivery, and allow DoD customers to overcome barriers to cloud adoption, including shortage of skills, lack of interoperability within existing information technology architectures and complexities of service-level objective achievement. ACE Laboratory collaborators will learn how Red Hat's modular and open technology portfolio, designed to run consistently across physical servers, virtual platforms and private and public clouds, can be integrated into their cloud architecture. Organizations working to develop and implement a cloud strategy can gain the knowledge and practical experience needed to select open source components for private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), develop applications using PaaS and achieve mission and business objectives by delivering and consuming Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

"Red Hat has a longstanding relationship with SAIC to provide open source technologies and methodologies on large programs in the federal government, dating back to our first master marketing agreement in 2006,” said Paul Smith, Red Hat’s vice president and general manager of public sector. “This most recent iteration capitalizes the widespread use by cloud providers of open source architectures to deliver services. Red Hat is a leading provider of supported, secure and scalable products for both IaaS and PaaS."

“Using our ACE Lab, SAIC experts work with customers to develop advanced engineering solutions for some of our nation’s most significant cyber and software challenges,” said Jim Thigpen, SAIC senior vice president and business unit general manager. “With Red Hat on our team, we’re continually finding ways to use our expertise to help keep customers a step ahead of the curve when it comes to cloud computing.”

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.