Applications can make or break an operating system.  Microsoft’s snowballing success with Windows in the desktop market stands as the most notable example of that, but the same also holds true in mobile and the enterprise, where ecosystem support is often just as important as the platform itself.

Red Hat has not lost sight of that fact in its quest for data center domination. The Linux distributor this morning announced an expanded partnership with SAP aimed at facilitating a broader range of analytical use cases atop its hybrid cloud stack while making it easier for users to sustain their existing technology investments.

The German business intelligence (BI) giant is one of the most influential companies in the industry with more than 250,000 corporate customers around the world and a user base numbering in the tens of millions. That makes it a crucial ally for any platform vendor with enterprise ambitions, regardless if it’s competing in the operating system market or the cloud.

In the case of Red Hat, it’s both. Yet while its flagship Linux distribution, RHEL, has long been certified to run SAP applications, it didn’t have the software maker’s blessing to power production deployments of HANA, which is arguably the single most important component of its portfolio. The in-memory analytical database underpins the BI titan’s cloud strategy and serves as the backend for many of its newer on-premise applications as well.

Professional support for the platform had up until now only been available with the SUSE Linux Enterprise, the biggest competitor to RHEL. The newly announced collaboration between Red Hat and SAP breaks that years-long monopoly and allows joint customers to benefit from the full backing of both firms without having to introduce additional complexity to their environments.

The move provides an important strategic boost for the companies. By extending support for HANA to RHEL, SAP is making the database accessible to more organizations and providing existing users with increased freedom of choice, which is becoming increasingly important for CIOs amid the growing industry focus on openness. From Red Hat’s standpoint, meanwhile, the alliance serves to even the playing field against SUSE on another front while giving more weight to its sales pitch.

The company pegs RHEL as the on-premise pillar of an open hybrid architecture that it says customers can standardize their entire SAP implementations on to streamline management and enable interoperability across  disparate deployments.  The public cloud component, in turn is OpenShift, which is also being updated as part of the expanded partnership.

Following through on an April announcement, SAP is making it possible for customers to deploy its Adaptive Server Enterprise relational backend, SAP IQ  data warehouse and Sybase SQL store on the platform-as-a-service in the form of “cartridges,” pre-packaged extensions that require minimal effort to set up. The launch comes two weeks after the vendor  announced  several of its core applications, including its flagship Business Suite,  will be made available on Microsoft’s competing Azure platform later this quarter.  The firms also revealed plans to link their offerings in order to make it easier for end-users to move information in and out of their organizations’ BI systems.

SAP is now collaborating with Red Hat to  deliver similar functionality for RHEL environments. The companies are promising to provide real-time data integration with third party software solutions via the former’s JBoss suite of middleware tools, functionality that ties in nicely with the Linux distributor’s open source focus and the interoperability aspect of the hybrid cloud, which is still largely unrealized.  Making business information more accessible at the organizational level is a step in the right direction.