US DoD Buys Renewed Support for Red Hat Certificate Software
The department’s Defense Information Systems Agency has agreed to purchase subscriptions for Red Hat Certificate System software. The contract is a two-year deal with possible extensions. It permits the DoD to keep track of as many as 12 million certificates, and an optional extension could boost that to 38 million. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The software is used to issue digital credentials, called certificates, that help identify people and computing equipment such as workstations and network routers. The certificates are included in each Department of Defense (DoD) employee’s digital ID card, used to gain access to buildings or computers.
This deal renews support for software that was sold by America Online’s Netscape Communications group until Red Hat acquired it in December.
Computing services company August Schell Enterpries, Inc. in Rockville, MD made the sale, as it’s currently the only company authorized to resell this software to the federal government. The company still employs some of the original Netscape programmers who began working on the Defense Department project when it was a pilot, in 1998.
The deal furthers two Red Hat initiatives: replacing Sun Microsystems technology and penetrating government accounts. While DoD security software runs on Sun’s Solaris operating system, a move to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux foundation is rumored to be a strong possibility in the future. This deal improves those odds.
The deal’s as-yet unrevealed financial terms are also significant to Red Hat in more ways than one. Under that deal in which Red Hat acquired Netscape’s server software, if Red Hat signs a deal with the Defense Department worth more than $3 million, the company must pay AOL an additional $2.5 million over and above the $20.5 million it initially paid for the group. News.com: Defense Department Signs Red Hat Deal
