Red Hat says it wants to drive adoption of edge computing though its channel partners.

“Enabling the channel is important for us to scale,” said Red Hat’s SVP of industries and global, Darrell Jordan-Smith.

“Our businesses is selling software,” he said. “We have a small services part of our business that enables the use of software, but we need the wider channel to actually pick that up and scale.”

Jordan-Smith was speaking at a roundtable event with Intel in London Tuesday. He said from both companies’ perspectives, the focus was on educating and enabling their ecosystem of partners.

Red Hat’s Darrell Jordan-Smith

“The ecosystem of ISVs in the marketplace around operational technology, and AI and ML applications and services, are really important. They’re looking for a consistent platform that’s secure that they can build on. So one of the things Red Hat is very focused on is creating that environment for them to build those applications to drive that innovation.”

Red Hat Application Foundations

Red Hat announced this week Red Hat Application Foundations. It’s a connected set of application services that together with Red Hat OpenShift help accelerate containerized application development and delivery across hybrid and multicloud environments. The company says they serve as a toolkit for organizations looking to quickly build and integrate application and data services.

Jordan-Smith also noted a blurring of the lines between ISVs and operational technology companies.

“Five years ago, Siemens was a customer. Now Siemens is a partner, building software with us in their environment so that operational technology makes them an ISV. They’re realising that all these things can be stitched together. They’re looking at systems integrators and other channels to get to market to deliver the solutions around these specific use cases.”

“This whole thing will fundamentally change the way channel is going to address the edge. That’s how everybody will scale,” he said.

Meaningful Deployment of Edge Computing

Attending the event, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright maintained that edge computing was longer just a concept. The technology has now reached a stage of meaningful deployment in areas like manufacturing and logistics.

Red Hat’s Chris Wright

“There’s real activity happening,” he said. “It’s not just where it’s really easy to work to create vision and enthusiasm. … There aren’t just concepts of smart cities, but there are smart cities that are getting funded and are under development.”

A year ago at Red Hat Summit 2021, the company geared many of its product announcements around the edge, DevSecOps, hybrid cloud and managed services.

Red Hat also said it was shifting to a co-creation model, incentivizing a “sell with” rather than a “sell to” model for partners. At that time, SVP of global enterprise go-to-market, David Farrell, said Red Hat did about 75% of its business with or though partners.