Channel Opportunities for Red Hat Partners

It is expected that channel partners of Red Hat will have greater opportunities this year as the company is broadening it channel focus. This is because Red Hat's main route to market is channel partners. 

The vice president of Red Hat's North America channel sales and development, Roger Egan, has stated that the channel is the only means through which the company can grow: “In order to deliver solutions to the market place, we really have to work together.”

According to Egan, the emphasis on the channel is not new; the partner aspect of the business is always discussed at the beginning of every quarterly financial call.

Around 65 percent of the company's revenue in December's third fiscal quarter was a result of channel sales. Egan also stated that Red Hat hopes that 100 percent of its business is touched by partners.

Four key areas will be focused on this year as Red Hat continues to build its success in the channel. This will include: channel engagement, alignment, capabilities and community.

In terms of engagement, Red Hat will focus on field engagements with fewer accounts (moving on from last year's rules of engagement and coverage). This means that thousands of “not-named” accounts will need the engagement of partners.

On the benefits side, the channel program is being realigned so that all partners will be treated equally and similarly.

The specialization program is also being refurbished, providing more variety to both customers and partners, broadening the scope of incentives for all partner levels. Incentives include: deal registration, deals in specific technology areas and the referral business. This will result in an integrated return-on-investment model, said Egan.

To build “community,” the company will expand social media tools usage, encouraging communication with partners. Partner feedback will also be collected to develop those relationships.

Egan said that Red Hat is now discussing the potentials of cloud-like solutions including information-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service; the company has certainly moved on from offering a single product, Red Hat Linux, five years ago.

Egan added: “Our position in data center infrastructures has changed dramatically. We need partners. And, they need us.”

Influencer incentives also need to be stronger and more worthwhile, according to Egan: “Many partners integrate solutions, but they don't sell the technology. We need to make sure the benefits are better for such partners.”

Working with the company's alliance partners, more solutions can also be developed by Red Hat for the channel.

Egan stated: “Building a solution today often can be done with reference architectures and by pulling together different parts of the solution together into a whole. And then the solution becomes much more valuable for the marketplace.”

The president of Campbell, California-based Groupware Technology and Computing, Mike Thompson, said that working with Red Hat is appropriate to the vendor's partner-led culture: “Red Hat has become an important piece of the total solutions we talk to customers about. Red Hat makes it easy for us to leverage our expertise on our solutions.”

The director of Toronto, Ontario-based OnX Enterprise Solutions' new business development and software solutions, Dean Bedwell, said that there is a serious focus on the channel from Red Hat, and the company is becoming more important to partners.

Bedwell said: “They have a very compelling set of things they bring to customers and are doing it in a very collaborative fashion. And when you add in all the parts including virtualization, middleware and RHEL, it's a very compelling solution.” (CY) Link