Who will get the biggest chunk of blockchain and distributed services customers? The fight between internet and IT heavyweights is definitely in progress. The latest entrant to the segment is Red Hat. The company has openly offered blockchain services to small companies, startups, and upstarts in the domain.
The announcement last week came no sooner than Microsoft’s announcement about its collaboration with R3 Consortium. While Microsoft is targeting big banks and businesses with its Azure Blockchain as a Service platform, Red Hat has taken the bottom-down approach. According to the largest open source enterprise solutions provider, fintech startups, independent software vendors, and financial institutions are free to use the company’s OpenShift platform to explore cloud based blockchain services. They can build updated blockchain based applications using. Open source software to streamline their operations and integrate the new technology into their existing offerings.
In order to make it easier for their customers, Red Hat is also working on offering the independent software vendors with adequate training on its OpenShift platform along with an OpenShift Commons membership. These companies will also be receiving training and guidance on their go-to market strategies and other materials that will help them gain a foothold in the market. The announcement of the new package is sure to attract a lot of attention from the crypto community as most of the crypto currency platforms are already open source.
The whole idea of creating open source platforms for cryptocurrency was spearheaded by Bitcoin, the mother of all blockchain based crypto-tech. Using open source software and development platforms like the ones offered by Red Hat will be the logical choice for all developers in this circle.
With so many new startups and individual developers creating applications over blockchain, mainly on bitcoin and Ethereum platform, Red Hat’s bottom up approach will gain more audience than the top down initiative bring pursued by Microsoft.