Open source powerhouse Red Hat debuted CloudForms today, an infrastructure-as-a-service solution for enterprises working with hybrid clouds.  The company is touting several advantages.

One of the main advantages, not surprisingly, is that it’s completely open.  Red Hat says that its offering supports multiple infrastructure types including all the major hypervisors, as well as a very broad range of tools and applications that an enterprise may be running in its environment.

What makes CloudForms unique, however, is the fact that it is built from the ground up to support power users. The company promises that its software can provide self-service capabilities to users while not compromising in the security and control departments.

“The role of enterprise IT is evolving. There’s no doubt that end users want to help themselves to cloud-like compute resources, but the IT department still needs to centralize deployment, management and integration,” said Rachel Chalmers, vice president, Research, Infrastructure Management at 451 Research, a division of leading global analyst and data company The 451 Group. “A platform like CloudForms makes it possible for organizations to build clouds that span their in-place infrastructure and expose it to a new generation of developers and end users, all without relinquishing control.”

The cloud is only one area that Red Hat is pursing. Big data is also at the top of its to-do list, and it has been very active in this industry throughout the past few months. In January it announced a partnership with business intelligence firm Jaspersoft  to give users of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 more insight into their infrastructure. This is accomplished via integrating with JasperReports Server, a tool that allows admins to view historical data spanning performance, user activity and bottom line efficiency.