Red Hat and GroundWork Open Source announced an interesting expansion of their partnership today that sees Red Hat offering 24×7 telephone premium support for GroundWork products, as well as the sale of GroundWork training classes.

At first glance the relationship seems like a good fit, with GroundWork’s IT and network monitoring capabilities complementing the Linux systems management capabilities delivered via Red Hat Network and middleware management capabilities of JBoss Operations Network.

Last week we noted how active a consolidator Red Hat has been in recent years, prompting Matt Asay to ponder on some potential future acquisition targets. Almost as an aside he mentioned Hyperic as a potential target, which would certainly make sense given Hyperic HQ is built on JBoss and JBoss ON is built on Hyperic HQ.

Could GroundWork also be a potential target? Most definitely given the increasingly close partnership, although that assumes Red Hat wants to buy its way into the wider systems management market. It has previously denied harboring such ambitions.