theCUBE Live At Red Hat Summit 2014

Responding to similar gestures from rivals, Red Hat Inc. has begun offering up a basket of free goodies to startups that choose OpenShift over the competition. The move follows the open-source stalwart shelling out over $80 million for the UK’s FeedHenry Ltd. to augment the platform-as-a-service suite with mobile development capabilities in a parallel effort to catch up to the market on another front.

To start off, participants in the newly launched OpenShift Startup Program receive a certain amount of “promotional credit” to spend on Red Hat’s application services in order to help jump start their projects. The company didn’t specify the value of the reward, which could mean that it varies on a case-by-case basis depending on the specific needs of the member.

But it also could be that Red Hat doesn’t want to advertise that its offer amounts to less than the $100,000 worth of services Google Inc. is promising under the  Cloud Platform for Startups initiative it debuted last month. But while it may not be as generous on the financial side, any cloud startup can apply for Red Hat’s cloud bundle, whereas Google’s new program and Amazon similar Portfolio Package are only available to members of select funds. Red Hat may be reasoning that a bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush.

In addition, the OpenShift Startup Program offers participants networking opportunities in the form of introduction to potential clients and “special consideration” for membership in accelerators that Red Hat is involved with. Thatcan be a lot more valuable to an up-and-coming team than $100,000 worth of cloud credit is to a venture-backed startup. But the Linux distributor is not stopping there.

On top of everything else, the program also offers consultancy support from Red Hat’s operations and marketing teams along with access to its award-winning Customer Experience and Engagement team. The firm is also promising to throw its sales weight behind participating startups and, where appropriate, add their products to the OpenShift Marketplace.

Rounding out the package are complementary support and technical account management services in addition to what is perhaps the most notable item in the bundle: help with migrating software from the public cloud to on-premise installations. That is presumably designed to help members scale their environments and expand the scope of their solutions as demand from customers grows, which indicates that Red Hat is in it for the long haul with the program, focusing as much as retaining users as it does on reeling them in.