Being open is at the heart of Red Hat’s channel approach

One of the fundamentals of open source is that it involves being “open” – and that is the philosophy Red Hat is taking in its approach to its partner ecosystem.

Everyone in the industry talks about the need for a strong ecosystem and decent relationships between partners, distributors, vendors and ISVs, but few will have the concept of being “open” quite as much at their heart as Red Hat does.

“It’s a joint collaborative effort among the different companies that are getting together in that ecosystem,” said Santiago Madruga, Red Hat vice president, EMEA Ecosystem,  “Coming from an open source community, I think that’s a significant value that we contribute. For many years, it’s not just a transactional relationship, it is something that is very strategic to their business and needs to be maintained and evolved in a good manner.

“We are working very closely with our partners in the ecosystem, to make sure that customers, their customers, our customers together, will be happy with all of us for years to come. So we care a lot about the lifecycle of the solution, which is something that we, as an ecosystem, can evolve well for many years, and the customers can be happy and trusting on that ecosystem.”

Open source has grown in popularity over the past couple of decades and most customers understand the technology and the reasons why they would opt for the software. In parallel, the vendor’s channel has also grown in importance and is seen as one of the main routes to market.

“These are very exciting times in the industry in general and I think Red Hat is very well positioned to play a key role, together with our partners, and we are more conscious than ever about the value of our partners. Customers are going digital,” said Madruga.

“It is accelerating and becoming more of an imperative in different industries that are not only changing their technologies, but also their business models. Maybe the new thing is that technology these days is becoming more available to the businesses that want to use it to innovate and to disrupt in their different areas of work.”

The emergence of hybrid work, more focus on digital transformation and a customer demand for flexibility are all playing into the hands of Red Hat and Madruga is feeling positive about prospects for the rest of 2022.

“All customers have a need to go more digital and use the technology to innovate and to make their own businesses better,” he said. “That could be by getting more customers and exciting the customer demand with new offers. It could also be just becoming more efficient and using technology to bring the costs down of the industry.

“Everybody nowadays is very clear that the best way to achieve all those business goals is with technology. So I think we are absolutely in the right spot.”