Boston University (BU) has long been a big part of the Red Hat Research program and Red Hat’s academic collaboration generally. On April 27, the two organizations took that collaboration up a level. Red Hat is donating software subscriptions, valued at over half a billion dollars, to BU while also announcing a renewed and expanded commitment of $20 million to support research and deepen collaboration under the Red Hat Collaboratory at BU.
Among the specific plans associated with this agreement are a joint operations research center to study automated hybrid cloud operations at a larger scale. This will bring together Red Hat operations engineers, BU researchers, faculty and students to advance operations and systems research using the cloud ops data generated by the open research cloud initiative. This is part of an increased focus on communities working in the open not just on the upstream code but on what’s needed to operate that code in a production environment as laid out by the Operate First concept.
Red Hat CEO, Paul Cormier, puts it this way: “By expanding our collaboration with BU, we can help advance the groundbreaking work on projects within the open research cloud initiative like the Mass Open Cloud. By working together, we can help deliver the next generation of open source technologies that solve real-world challenges as the industry moves to hybrid cloud as its preferred architecture and deployment model for the future.”
For more details, see the official press release from Red Hat and Boston University.
