Red Hat is cutting prices on the commercial version of its OpenShift Online PaaS (platform as a service) and making it available in more European countries, moves aimed at gaining a stronger foothold in one of the enterprise software industry’s hottest segments.
OpenShift Online Silver is based on the OpenShift Origin open-source software project and runs on infrastructure from Amazon Web Services. It went live in June.
Customers purchase access to OpenShift Online based on “gears,” the resource containers that run the OpenShift Online software stacks. On Monday, Red Hat said its hourly gear pricing has been cut by 50 percent, and that gears with 2GB of RAM are available along with the existing 512MB and 1GB options. Gears now cost US$0.02 to $0.10 per hour.
The service is now available in Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta.
A community version of OpenShift Online is also available, as well as OpenShift Enterprise for private cloud and on-premises deployments.
OpenShift Online competes with PaaS products from Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle and SAP. Red Hat touts OpenShift’s ability to support a range of languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP and Python, as giving it an edge over rivals.
Global spending on PaaS is expected to grow to $14 billion by 2017 compared to $3.8 billion in 2012, fueled by companies wishing to speed up application development while saving money on IT infrastructure, according to a report recently released by research firm IDC.
That amounts to a 30 percent compound annual growth rate, in contrast to the roughly 4 percent rise in overall IT spending this year, according to IDC.