Red Hat has launched its Exchange (RHX) business application service, first announced in March, for its US software partners. The company has pledged to extend the scheme to European independent software vendors (ISVs) and customers by 2008. 

The RHX web site is designed to be an open source applications market place where customers can easily research any software that they might be interested in. It provides access to fact based application profiles, user ratings and reviews, free trials and online purchase options.

A range of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software will initially be delivered as an integrated solution stack via the Red Hat network, though other types of application are planned for a later stage.

Crucially, Red Hat will provide customers with a single point of contact for all the support issues associated with the applications made available through RHX.

“When we go and try to convince senior management that open source is the way to go, their concern is always who is going to support it. If we can show we have Red Hat as ‘one throat to choke’ when we have a problem and one cheque to write, that will add value and credence,” said one Red Hat customer, an IT manager at a US medical company.

Andre Boisvert, chairman of RHX partner Compiere, revealed that the scheme saved one of its UK customers from switching to Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux support program late last year.

“When we negotiated the deal, the customer was thinking about switching [to Oracle], but we were able to give them advance notice of RHX and all the benefits of one contract, one invoice and one bill, and that stopped them,” he said.

Red Hat product marketing manager Donald Fischer.Donald Fischer said the RHX service will be expanded to Europe before the end of this year.

“We have had a lot of interest from international partners and customers and we will try to roll it out [to other countries] as fast as we can,” he said.

But M. Zack Urlocker, executive vice president of products at RHX partner MySQL, said that there was no reason why the package could not be immediately rolled out to UK customers at least.

“It is English language so there is no barrier there. Sometimes Red Hat is a little too conservative - it is fair to say they could have done this two years ago,” he said.