There are a number of reasons for using public cloud services, including rapid access to technology resources and the ability to reduce overhead costs associated with maintaining on-premise infrastructure. But despite the low barrier to entry afforded by the pay-as-you-go model, the advantages of cloud computing remain inaccessible to many enterprises due to all the legacy baggage they’re carrying and the need to sustain existing IT investments.

Recognizing the challenges, open source stalwart Red Hat has joined forces with Google to make things a little easier for customers on the latter front. As of today, five months after the search giant joined the company’s Certified Cloud Provider program, Red Hat Enterprise Linux users can move their subscriptions to Google Compute Engine. Oracle and Verizon announced a similar arrangement in January, making it possible for companies to transfer their existing database licenses to the carrier’s emerging public cloud instead of renting the software for a monthly fee.

Red Hat’s latest partnership comes in response to accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud services, highlighting the maturity of the market, and also represents a small but significant advance in its efforts to make open hybrid computing more appealing to large organizations – even at the price of helping the competition. After all, Google Compute Engine competes directly with the firm’s OpenFlow platform-as-a-service solution, which was recently updated with support for .NET and Microsoft SQL Server in a similar gesture of openness.

“Developers want choice. So as much as we have affinity and we have expertise developing in the Linux arena and Java with the JBoss technologies, we want to make sure we have an opportunity to reach out to folks using Ruby or GNOME or other languages and frameworks like Python and Perl and PHP,” Ashesh Badani, the head of Red Hat’s cloud business, told SiliconANGLE in a December interview.

photo credit: Wander Boessenkool via photopin cc