Red Hat CEO calls on partners to get behind hybrid cloud

Red Hat has spoken of an increasing role for its partners to help customers navigate a hybrid cloud world and has touched on the increasing demand for open source solutions.

The vendor has been holding its Summit over the past couple of days and conducted a partner session that underlined its commitment to the channel.

Paul Cormier, president and CEO at Red Hat, said open source underpinned hybrid cloud and that market continued to expand, increasing opportunities for its channel.

“Open source has taken off so quickly over the last number of years and it really is the predominant development technology in the infrastructure and development world today,” he said. “It’s here to stay because it’s really the foundation of delivering on hybrid cloud.

“It’s too big for any one company to solve – we can’t do this without our partners. Together, we can really deliver industry-relevant solutions to our customers.”

Cormier said the firm wanted better alignment of its partners across geographies because that was the way most of its customers were operating.

“Our partners build, certify around our platform so that we can take our partners into the hybrid world,” he said. “Our partners, especially the ISVs, when they build and certify on our platform, they can now use our platform for them to scale that hybrid architecture as well and we can take our partners with us all the way out into the edge.”

Cormier said many customers did not have the in-house skills, and managed services was a way the channel could help them plug those gaps.

“Managed services is a way to help them keep their platforms up and running across this hybrid architecture and we can help them with customer lifecycle management of our platforms and products,” he said. “You don’t install this once and leave it alone – this has a lifecycle.”

Cormier added that Red Hat wanted to increase the focus with partners around adoption and renewals to make sure customers were choosing and sticking with the vendor.

Another area where Red Hat is looking for increased channel activity is around its hybrid cloud tools that come under the OpenShift banner.

“We want to give you all the opportunities around OpenShift,” he said. “It’s also built on Linux and we want to empower our ISV ecosystem to win those workloads and create a new route to market across hybrid cloud for you.”

Cormier’s keynote also touched on distribution, with the CEO describing it as an important way for the firm to cover the glove efficiently.

Tim Yeaton, executive vice-president and CMO at Red Hat, said the firm was focused on customer-centric marketing and wanted to help partners reach out to prospects.

“Over the past year as the world changed around us, we rallied around a company mandate to support our customers and partners in a highly personalised and contextually relevant way,” he said.

Yeaton added that evidence of what that looked like in practice included the efforts Red Hat had made with SIs to target vertical markets and had increased exposure of ISVs through its marketplace.

He said it had also been providing support and its channel enablement and marketing programmes had been used by 10,000 global partners.

“We are proving we can scale to meet all of our partner needs, no matter their role is in the ecosystem,” said Yeaton. “With our own ambitious revenue goals for the next three years, the only way to achieve them is through rapid scale with our ecosystem in a shared success model.”