RENO, Nev., Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — CIQ, the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux, today announced self-service purchasing in the CIQ portal (portal.ciq.com). Developers, startups, and small businesses can now evaluate and buy CIQ’s commercial Enterprise Linux products directly, with a credit card, at the moment they decide they need them. Developers increasingly decide which infrastructure their organizations run, and a direct path to purchase lets adoption begin with the people building and managing operating systems. For startups and small businesses, it reduces the time and administrative burden required to reach production-grade Linux, infrastructure, and support.

The CIQ portal now takes a team from first look to production in one place. Users browse the full product portfolio and download ISOs, VM and cloud images, container images, and packages. They claim free or developer licenses, evaluate commercial products, and buy them directly. Licenses, credentials, organizations, team roles, and permissions are managed from the same interface, alongside CIQ documentation and support. Free software is available the moment an account is created, and commercial products are available to anyone ready to buy one.

“Enterprise-grade infrastructure should not require enterprise-grade procurement,” said Bjorn Hovland, president of CIQ. “Infrastructure decisions get made long before they reach a procurement committee, whether that is a three-person startup or a team inside a midsize company. We built the same direct path for both.”

Self-service purchasing in the CIQ portal expands access to CIQ’s offerings for individual developers, startups, and small and midsize businesses. It preserves the enterprise-grade products, support, security, and expertise that larger customers rely on. Nothing about the software changes based on how it is bought.

The launch also reinforces CIQ’s developer license program. Developers can experiment, build, test, and become familiar with CIQ technology at no cost before moving into paid production use. Together, the free developer program and self-service payments create a path from experimentation to production:

  • Start for free. Create a portal account and download RLC+, the free Rocky Linux distribution from CIQ, or claim a developer license for RLC Pro or RLC Pro AI.
  • Validate the technology. Build and test against the same Enterprise Linux that runs in production at some of the largest organizations in the world.
  • Purchase directly when ready. Buy in the portal at the point the workload moves to production.
  • Expand as needs grow. Move into larger deployments, and engage CIQ enterprise support as scale and compliance requirements increase.

Self-service purchasing covers CIQ’s commercial Enterprise Linux products, each available with a choice of support level:

  • RLC Pro. CIQ’s commercial Enterprise Linux subscription, with Long-Term Support, FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, and direct CIQ bug fixes.
  • RLC Pro Hardened. Enterprise Linux for security-critical environments, with Linux Kernel Runtime Guard, pre-hardened images for DISA STIG and CIS frameworks, and automated compliance tooling.
  • RLC Pro AI. Enterprise Linux for AI and HPC infrastructure, with the CIQ Linux Kernel, the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and DOCA-OFED stack, and popular ML frameworks pre-validated together.

Purchases activate licenses immediately in the portal. Customers manage their subscriptions, review billing history, and access invoices from the same interface they use to manage credentials and team permissions. Larger purchases and custom terms remain available through the CIQ sales team.

Open infrastructure should be broadly accessible to everyone, not only to organizations large enough to manage lengthy procurement cycles. The underlying payment architecture also lays the groundwork for a future in which autonomous software agents acquire infrastructure and services directly on behalf of the teams they support.

Self-service purchasing is available now at portal.ciq.com. Existing customers can log in immediately. New users can create a free account to access RLC+ and developer licenses, and purchase commercial products when they are ready.

About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.

Contact:
Stephanie Schlegal
ciq@offleashpr.com


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