When you run enterprise product X on Red Hat version Y, that vendor will do less fingerpointing. They may even work with Red Hat in the backend to deal with bug

When you run enterprise product X on Red Hat version Y, that vendor will do less fingerpointing. They may even work with Red Hat in the backend to deal with bugs, etc. If you go put that on Debian or whatever, they’ll make you reproduce on RHEL. This becomes a big deal when you have RHEL, VMWare, and other vendors in the mix. If you ignore the certification, the app vendor or VMWare will just shrug at you.