by Hidayatullah Shaikh
Vice President & Distinguished Engineer, Engineering and User Experience, Red Hat Marketplace
by Hidayatullah Shaikh
Vice President & Distinguished Engineer, Engineering and User Experience, Red Hat Marketplace
Last year, we officially introduced Red Hat Marketplace to the general public and gave enterprise developers a first-of- its-kind, open software marketplace built on Red Hat OpenShift. I’m so proud of the work our developers have accomplished and the cross-collaboration that’s been done with teams across Red Hat Marketplace, IBM, and Red Hat.
It’s been my pleasure to report some of the key features we’ve made available for users and sellers each month since July. Today, I want to recap some of the top development highlights from the year and end telling you about one of the most exciting collaborations of all that we completed at the very end of 2020. Let’s dive in.
Users can now deploy product trials to a free Red Hat Marketplace cluster. Simply register your free trial cluster to your account and start deploying free trials.
You can now easily drill-down to view exactly what products you currently have active subscriptions for. From Dashboard, in the Active subscriptions section, click purchases, free editions, or trials to launch to a filtered view on My software.
We’ve launched capabilities for Red Hat Marketplace Select users to create department, project, and custom tags to represent your organization structure on Red Hat Marketplace. You can also add tags to purchases on My Software, and then filter product data to enable spend visibility by department, project, or custom tags. You can now also apply tags to dashboard charts to view product data specific to the applied tag and enable chargeback visibility.
With a Red Hat Marketplace Select plan, your company administrators can preapprove products for purchase by other users on the plan, making it easy for you to see if a product is already approved or not for purchase and use. Users with the Purchaser role can buy approved products, and users can also see when a product has already been purchased by someone else at the company. And, if you’re seeking to use software on Red Hat Marketplace not already approved by your administrator, we’ve created a ‘Contact Administrator’ button on the software product page. When clicked, an email request goes directly to your administrator expressing interest in the product.
We’ve exposed the status of each installed Operator on the software details page. We also improved error handling throughout our cluster list, cluster registration, and install operator pages. Now, you can see and understand Operator status updates inside Red Hat Marketplace without having to go into your Red Hat OpenShift console.
You can now set up and enable a product you’d like to list on Red Hat Marketplace for consumption-based pricing. Users can then purchase consumption-based editions directly from your listing and will see charges incurred based on product usage.
We’ve added a feature where you can create commerce rules to manage complex pricing schemes when configuring editions.
When configuring a free trial, sellers can now enter their own trial duration values. We also updated the configuration section for volume pricing; when configuring volume pricing sellers can enter a value on the Increments box to bundle charges into one line item.
We want to help sellers efficiently onboard to Red Hat Marketplace by enabling self-service application and onboarding workflows. Now, during company and product setup, we’ve designed a new view for you to see the status of each onboarding task more clearly at each step. We’ve also redesigned the Payment setup page and the Legal terms page. We’ve also enabled you to now select SaaS with operator from the Deployment method list, so that you can onboard SaaS with operator products to the marketplace.
To give you more visibility into how your product will appear once listed, we’ve added a feature to our redesigned partner product setup page that enables you to preview your product page before it goes into production.
We rolled out a number of enhancements and features in December, but I want to call out one very exciting update: the availability of more than 120 public datasets for access and download through Red Hat Marketplace. Our development team worked tirelessly with Red Hat Marketplace business development, legal, design, and other stakeholders to make datasets covering critical topics – such as COVID-19, weather, economics, mobility, and climate data – available for developers to download. We’ll be providing a more in-depth look at what we’ve done and how to take advantage of it in future blog posts.
I’m confident that 2021 will be full of big announcements from Red Hat Marketplace. I’ll be updating you every month with the latest and greatest from our development teams.