Red Hat Reveals Major Changes to Channel Strategy
Red Hat is shifting to a co-creation model, incentivizing a "sell with" rather than ‘sell to’ partner approach.
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The Red Hat channel is going through “fundamental changes”; therefore, partners will soon see a different strategy in how the company engages with them.
So says David Farrell, SVP of global strategic alliances at Red Hat. He says the company is shifting to a channel strategy based on co-creation with partners.
Red Hat’s David Farrell
Farrell maintains that distribution, and the value-add it provides, remains critical to Red Hat’s channel plans. However, it is “moving away from a distribution-oriented mindset that leverages the ecosystem for scale,” he said. “Red Hat has been making significant investments in how we engage with partners prior to them developing their own solutions. An example would be what we’ve done with Accenture and SAP running on our Red Hat stack. It’s looking at a market opportunity and bringing in people from our product development organization. We’re putting resources into our partners to help co create a solution with them.”
Farrell said the move was reflected in “a lot more headcount and investment dollars.”
“We didn’t used to do that, just to be quite honest,” he said. “It was, ‘Here’s our technology, here’s a support line, here are a few engineers to help you out. Good luck with it.’ Now it is much more around, ‘What’s the opportunity? How do we build new capability together?’”
From Selling To, to Selling With Partners
The second area of investment focuses on how Red Hat sells with partners. Farrell said the vendor is moving from selling to – or through – partners, to selling alongside them.