Red Hat today has made widely available version 2.0 of its OpenShift Enterprise private Platform-as-a-Service as the underpinning of its xPaaS Services for OpenShift offering.

OpenShift Enterprise, according to Red Hat’s OpenShift general manager Ashesh Badani, gives developers a way to automate provisioning in an on-demand, scalable environment, while providing IT operations with data-center integration and a new, advanced administration console to improve service delivery.

“We’ve embraced the notion of DevOps, saying, ‘How do we make it easy for developers to use the tools they’re comfortable with and get the benefits of an elastic, scalable cloud platform?’ ” Badani said.

Among the new features in OpenShift Enterprise 2 is an integration with the Heat project for OpenStack, including templates that make it easier to deploy applications into different environments, Badani explained.

The latest version of the private PaaS also supports a wider range of programming languages, such as Node.js for server-side JavaScript, and also adds collaboration capabilities.

“Enterprises are doing a rethink of their infrastructure,” Badani said. “They’re working well, but they want the benefits of the cloud in the next iteration of their infrastructure.”

That, he said, is where Red Hat’s vision of xPaaS Services for OpenShift comes in, where the “x” is a variable for any of the multiple services made available in this cloud.

“With OpenShift Enterprise, you get [Apache] Tomcat and JBoss EAP for folks who want to do Java EE development,” said Badani. “We’re starting to see customers also want other Java technologies available as a service, such as Fuse and ActiveMQ. Over the next one to three quarters, these other Java technologies will start finding their way into the OpenShift platform.”

The first four service platforms include those for applications, integration, business-process management and mobile, according to Pierre Fricke, director of product marketing at Red Hat. This could help move organizations to a hybrid cloud scenario, he said. The integration PaaS will include Fuse Service Works, which is a superset of JBoss Fuse that replaces the company’s old SOA platform.

The BPM platform, Fricke said, “could see some automated decision-making and some process hosting. First we’ll see business-process modeling development, with models that run on-premise that can be shared in the cloud.”

A mobile PaaS will involve push notifications, security, data encryption and synchronization, and will support native, hybrid and mobile Web apps, he added. Security is an area that continues to be built out, with visual tools in the works.

“In the last 18 months, we’ve released the commercial private PaaS offering, our public PaaS and now cloud-management tools,” said Badani. “We’ve essentially transformed the company from an operating system and middleware provider to provide a complete portfolio for the cloud.”