What are independent software vendor (ISV) partners?

ISV partners are independent software vendors that deliver all types of software and/or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings to address customer business or technical requirements. Solution providers like larger ISVs, software manufacturers, telecom carriers, hyperscalers, and internet service providers use ISV partners to provide you with complete solutions built on top of or combined with their products or services. Solution providers typically carefully select their ISV partners and test and certify their partners’ solutions to give customers confidence that the solutions can deliver as promised. 

The Red Hat® ISV partner ecosystem, searchable in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog, is an integral part of how Red Hat develops and delivers business and technical value to our customers. The ecosystem provides a community to solve business and technical challenges, build integrated solutions, and establish and grow deep relationships—all built around Red Hat’s world-leading open source solutions. Red Hat ISV partners and their solutions are carefully selected and certified to provide trusted, interoperable, and supported software. 

Hybrid cloud infrastructure is increasingly common within organizations across industries and cloud-native apps are commonly built in containers. With multiple cloud platforms in use, the need for a consistent hybrid cloud platform is critical because supporting each cloud service individually requires vendor-specific skills that might not be available in-house. In addition, custom solutions can result in vendor lock-in.

Many organizations rely on platforms like Red Hat Enterprise Linux® and Red Hat OpenShift® to avoid dependence on any one cloud provider—and to gain portability across cloud platforms. To support organizations looking to extend their IT landscapes across hybrid and multicloud environments, Red Hat cultivates a comprehensive ecosystem of software partners. These ISV partners work collaboratively with Red Hat to provide organizations with the specialized tools and expertise they need to operate more efficiently with greater flexibility and increased velocity. This collaboration involves the partner supporting Red Hat platforms using Red Hat recommended practices and going through a Red Hat certification process. Red Hat certified software solutions for hybrid cloud environments built on Red Hat OpenShift from the ISV partner ecosystem offer:

Flexibility to deploy applications across any environment.

Confidence that your containerized workloads are supported and optimized for standardized automation and management using Kubernetes technologies.

Enough automation at scale to meet your IT efficiency and performance KPIs and help support your targeted business growth.

Red Hat ISV partners build and certify their software on Red Hat platforms (Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform). Partners create solutions, based on Red Hat’s recommended practices, that are interoperable, supported, and managed in a consistent way. Red Hat software certification offers their customers assurance that an ISV’s product or solution interoperates with the Red Hat platform throughout its life cycle and is commercially supported by Red Hat and the partner(s).

Red Hat ISV partner solutions use Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes Operator and Helm technologies  in a prescribed way to deploy and maintain a cloud-like services experience. These partner solutions are:

• Built to run and operate the same way regardless of footprint whether it’s in public or private cloud, on-premise, at the edge, or a combination of environments.
• Managed in a consistent way to enhance operational experience and reduce learning costs.
• Tested and certified by Red Hat to operate according to defined standards and Red Hat recommended practices.
• Continuously scanned for vulnerabilities.

Red Hat ISV partner solutions that use Red Hat OpenShift do not lock users into specific hyperscalers or cloud platforms—they are optimized for Kubernetes and work across clouds.

Red Hat focuses on solutions for core workloads that enhance business value. For each workload, ISV partners offer the certified software, specialized tools, content, and expertise to help you do your job more efficiently, operate more flexibly, maximize application automation, and digitally transform. 

Red Hat makes it simple for you to confidently find ISV partners you can trust, choose the right software for the right workloads, and ensure the workloads are optimized for Red Hat OpenShift and a hybrid cloud experience. Certified software solutions from Red Hat ISV partners focus on a wide range of solutions, each critical to your organization’s success. The solution areas are:

In a competitive marketplace, agility and velocity are essential for application development. Solutions from Red Hat ISV partners like Dynatrace, JFrog, AppDynamics, GitHub, and GitLab provide developers with the platforms, methods, application services, and tools they need to produce higher-quality, cloud-native apps with greater agility, at scale, and without sacrificing reliability.

Legacy applications can pose a challenge to ongoing application development and maintenance as they require managing monoliths in disparate environments. Java and .Net applications on Microsoft, Cloud Foundry, or other platforms require an open hybrid cloud approach that Red Hat ISV partners help solve.

Many traditional applications are unable to effectively manage, analyze, and monetize the massive volumes of data generated by technologies like cloud, big data, and IoT. Red Hat ISV partners that focus on data like Couchbase, Cockroach Labs, Starburst, DataStax, and Crunchy Data offer solutions that accelerate and simplify the deployment of data-intensive, cloud-native databases, data analytics, and workloads to help you innovate faster and grow your business.

Security vulnerabilities, security breaches, and cyberattacks from state and non-state actors are increasing on a daily basis. As companies migrate to hybrid cloud and DevOps development, the size of the attack surface that needs to be protected and the complexity of protecting it expands significantly. You need a way to automate and enhance security for the entire application and container life cycle across hybrid and multicloud environments. Red Hat ISV partners certified for Red Hat OpenShift like Sysdig, Palo Alto Networks, Synopsys, Aqua Security, CyberArk, and Tigera, provide a single, cohesive, and efficient DevSecOps approach. A number of Red Hat security partners are also certified with the new Red Hat Vulnerability Scanner Certification to deliver more accurate and reliable container vulnerability scanning results for Red Hat published images and packages. Additionally, Red Hat is continuously evolving to set new standards for security to support hybrid cloud environments.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies are rapidly making inroads into operational areas and becoming critical to digital transformation for many organizations. Red Hat ISV partners like NVIDIA, C3.ai, Cloudera, SAS, Anaconda, and Plantir provide software tools and data services that run on Red Hat powered infrastructure to help accelerate and simplify development, testing, deployment, and life cycle management of AI/ML solutions—from proof of concept to production.

Organizations are increasingly developing cloud-native applications that are distributed, data intensive, more latency sensitive, and have the ability to connect across on-premise, cloud, and edge deployments. To provide predictable performance and a consistent user experience, cloud-native applications require cost-effective networks with scalable bandwidth, low latency, reliability, and security. Red Hat works closely with its network infrastructure partners like Cisco, Infoblox, Juniper Networks, F5, and NGINX to test, certify, integrate, and optimize the technologies businesses need to build networks that are cost effective, reliable, scalable, and more secure.

As organizations rely on increasingly complex data-driven apps, data storage needs to support many different workloads without creating performance challenges or security risks. Software-defined storage (SDS) decouples the software that manages the storage from the hardware and frees you from having to invest in storage appliances that bundle proprietary software and hardware. Instead, with SDS you can run storage software on the same industry-standard servers you use for everything else and scale your storage resources across bare-metal and cloud environments.

Red Hat ISV partners, like Dell, NetApp, Portworx by Pure Storage, and Veritas focus on software-defined storage solutions for interoperability, enhanced agility, and improved security. They provide scalable and resilient software-defined storage for running containerized workloads, including databases and data analytics.

To successfully run your business, you need a variety of different software solutions from different vendors  that specialize in areas relevant to your business and your industry. Red Hat provides platforms for ISV partners to create solutions that simplify and accelerate feature and customer experience development.

Red Hat Partner Connect is Red Hat’s program for engaging with partners. It provides Red Hat ISV partners with access to all of the resources that will deliver content and exclusive information on everything from training and certification to benefits and deals.