Red Hat, Inc, one of the leading providers of open-source software to the enterprise community, has announced a new partnership initiative for blockchain software vendors.

The initiative is called “Openshift Blockchain” and will aid fintech start-ups and independent software vendors (ISV’s) to build hosted blockchain solutions while Red Hat manages container application deployment. Red Hat will also provide support through Openshift Dedicated.

The goal is to provide a dev ecosystem capable of handling build activity ranging from the start-up to traditional financial institutions that are beginning to explore distributed ledger technology. The latter use case is one that the company is no doubt trying to further as more institutions show interest in the technology, but still need a place to experiment. This could provide the sandbox they need.

Through Openshift Blockchain Initiative, Red Hat also plans to facilitate access to “OpenShift Dedicated environment, training workshops, enablement materials, go-to-market activities, and OpenShift Commons membership.”

In earlier coverage here at CCN.com we covered the Red Hat and BlockApps partnership that resulted in the release of STRATO. Red Hat has quite successful positioned itself in the world of open source and now they are courting the ultimate open source by embracing these partnerships that allow for blockchain dev.

Regarding the new partnership, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of Consensys Enterprise says, “We are pleased to partner with Red Hat and have initially deployed BlockApps STRATO, our Ethereum Blockchain infrastructure on OpenShift. This platform supports the development of smart contract solutions and can allow developers to build and deploy their blockchain applications very quickly. The collaboration was a logical direction and BlockApps is incredibly excited to work with Red Hat as the first blockchain provider on the OpenShift platform.”

This is just the latest of clear indications from Red Hat that they want to help lead the space. Previously and notably the group participated as one of the 30 founding members of the Hyperledger Project the high profile project set forth to advance blockchain for recording and verifying transactions.

With initiatives such as this we are seeing the dev environment start to coagulate at scale. With access to these dev resources we can expect to see new companies and products emerge and accelerate.