Red Hat is giving startups free access to OpenShift, its platform-as-a-service cloud environment.
It means startups will be able to avoid any upfront costs but still take advantage of OpenShift’s developpment, testing, quality testing and hosting services to develop and run SaaS products.
The OpenShift Startup Programme is designed to attract entrepreneurs over rival PaaS clouds like Google, which launched a similar venture last month with $100,000 free credits.
And Red Hat is offering its own promotional credit to help startups launch their ideas, as well as support services, public to private cloud migration, migration to on-premise and marketing.
The company claims it will also introduce startups on the programme to prospective Fortune 500 customers.
Ashesh Badani, VP of OpenShift at Red Hat, said: "The average startup is moving at a fast and furious pace to get their business off the ground, but often gets bogged down in managing operations.
"By moving development into a hosted cloud solution – especially one with a free hosted tier like OpenShift – many of the typical server infrastructure pain points can be avoided.
"We want to make it easy for startups to benefit from the cloud, just as we do with our enterprise customers."
AppDirect, a cloud commerce management platform, open source javascript framework Mean.Io and continuous delivery platform Shippable are all early members of the programme so far.
Shippable CEO Avi Cavale said: "Having a partner like OpenShift by Red Hat, that can operate at scale and while helping us innovate in a niche area is critical for us to succeed.
"Their track record of recognizing and bringing in ground breaking technologies early into their platform creates a tremendous opportunity to accelerate transformative innovation for startups like us."
