Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that OVH has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider (CCSP) program, offering customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) greater confidence from a partner ecosystem when building their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions. As a Red Hat CCSP, OVH can use Red Hat technologies within its datacentres and offer its customers access to more robust, flexible and open solutions for their infrastructure projects, including hybrid and containerized architecture.

OVH is a French enterprise providing IT services to more than one million clients globally via its 18 datacentres located in Europe and Canada. Its commercial activities have helped it to become a leading hosting provider both in Europe and globally.

The certification means that Red Hat solutions will be available across datacentres operated by OVH globally, supplemented by top-range technical support. As a result of the certification, OVH intends to target large businesses, for which long-term support and a strong commitment to the associated services are important considerations at the time of choosing a supplier. This agreement will additionally enable OVH to develop new types of offerings, including solutions based on bare metal, while simultaneously providing integration with Red Hat technologies - an important consideration for a number of clients.

Cloud provider models have expanded beyond multi-tenant public clouds to include private cloud build-outs, Linux container-based infrastructure and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, and the Red Hat CCSP program was created to offer additional flexibility to help solution providers better meet customer needs for cloud-based Red Hat technologies. By selecting a Red Hat CCSP, customers and partners using custom-developed or third-party ISV applications certified to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat solutions can have greater confidence that these applications will function as expected when using them on a public cloud or managed service provider.

Red Hat's Certified Cloud and Service Provider designation is awarded to Red Hat partners following validation by Red Hat. Each provider must meet testing and certification requirements to demonstrate that they can deliver a safe, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments. The globally-unified program provides customers, ISVs, and partners with the confidence that Red Hat product experts have validated a given solution so that implementations can begin with a solid foundation.

"We are excited to work with OVH as a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider and part of the Red Hat partner ecosystem. We are committed to offering customers and developers broad choice in the cloud, and key to that vision is building a strong ecosystem of partners that can enable users to build and deploy the best applications possible. We look forward to continued collaboration with OVH as they utilize their cloud offerings with Red Hat." -- Mike Ferris, vice president, Business Development, Red Hat