According to a press release that came out of the Red Hat Summit, “Dell and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of co-engineered, enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack, the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The companies also have extended their collaboration to enable the compatibility, portability and reliability for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise customers need as they build public, private and hybrid cloud environments.”

The fact that Dell is reselling another company’s private cloud technology seems a bit disappointing to those who hoped Dell would provide private cloud offerings of their own.  However, given the current maturation of the market, this could be their best move…teaming up with an existing provider, and Red Hat is a pretty good choice.

However, I’m not sure there will be much of a difference when purchasing OpenShift from Dell or Red Hat.  However, I’m sure that Dell hopes to sell a few more servers along with Red Hat’s private cloud technology.  There will be some new tech that comes out of the relationship, but nothing earth shattering.

I suspect that this move won’t set the world on fire.  We’ve seen these kinds of partnerships in the past, and while they generate some interest at first, most fail to drive much in the way of additional sales for either company.