HCL, Red Hat to jointly offer cloud infrastructure leasing service

HCL Technologies, one of the top five Indian IT services companies, said it has tied up with Red Hat — the biggest open source software company — to offer Linux-based virtual infrastructure for companies.

A thematic by Red Hat

Under the product, clients will be able to lease cloud computing infrastructure from HCL that are more efficient that traditional cloud or datacenter infrastructure.

While traditional infrastructure depends on a technology called ‘virutalization’, HCL will use Red Hat’s OpenShift technology to take it to a new level, reducing hardware requirement and therefore, costs.

Instead of selling full blown virtual computers like Amazon does, the new service will offer ‘Linux containers’ — which are essentially mini machines that are tailored only to run a particular application, such as a database.

The overhead or hardware requirements of a container is far less than that of a virtual machine. The ‘containers’ can then be used by clients to run their cloud-based applications and software.

“While Red Hat offers award-winning container application platform technology, HCL will be the global systems integrator for consulting, architecture & designing, integrating, building and running the Solutions for enterprises,” said Kalyan Kumar, Chief Technology Officer – IT Services, HCL Technologies.

“With HCL’s expertise combined with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, developers can experience a reduction in time-to-market and complexity in bringing enterprise applications to production, helping them to focus more on innovation,” said Julio Tapia, Director, OpenShift Partner Ecosystem, Red Hat.

The move will help organizations develop applications faster with improved efficiency and agility, without worrying about many of the typical complexities of managing underlying infrastructure, it said.

Kalyan Kumar added that the tie-up is part of HCL Tech’s strategy to create partnerships to develop platforms for next-generation, cloud-based services for its clients.

HCL Tech is one of the leaders among Indian IT companies in offering ‘Infrastructure as a Service’, while Red Hat is the most profitable company that is entirely built using the open source software model.