6 Partner Ops: Red Hat Summit Edition

This week’s Red Hat Summit wasn’t just keynotes. From the show floor come six companies you’ve probably never heard of. Some have formal partner programs, others are just getting ramped up. All have experience with open-source software and can help you deliver big savings to customers.

EnterpriseDB provides enterprise-class support for Postgres, an open-source database considered a feasible option for companies that can’t afford, or are looking for an alternative to, Oracle. Works with hardware from HP and IBM, and claims reductions in TCO of 80 percent; partner programs for ISVs, resellers, integrators and more. Free trials available.

Why it’s interesting: Postgres is a mature database, and the company supports reseller partners with training, marketing tools and pricing packages that allow customers to start small and scale up. The writing is starting to appear on the wall for pricey, proprietary databases.

Pure Storage sells 100 percent through its channel program. The company’s all-flash FlashArray devices pack a lot of capacity and performance into neat 2U to 11U packages; at the top end, more than 400 TB effective capacity with less than 1 ms effective latency. The Purity OS is designed for flash and offers five to 10 times data reduction, with built-in disaster recovery. With the Pure1 management platform, partners can manage any number of FlashArrays locally and from the cloud. A spokesman said its products can cut the cost of storage in half while dramatically improving performance.

Why it’s interesting: As long as a customer stays current with support and maintenance, under the ForeverFlash program, they receive new controllers every three years, gratis. All software upgrades are included, and the company fully warranties the drives.

Tremolo Security provides identity-management software to help customers control access to applications in hybrid clouds, across SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Identity management is extremely important, but it can be expensive and complex to implement. Tremolo’s solution can be deployed quickly – a spokesman said users can be provisioned in minutes – and is reasonably priced, with a one-time fee of $150 per user plus 20 percent maintenance. While Tremolo hasn’t yet launched a formal program, it does sell through channel partners.

Why it’s interesting: The Unison product uses a thin integration layer rather than agents. Single sign-on improves the likelihood that customer employees will choose strong passwords since they only need to remember one.

VMTurbo provides unified management of cloud- and enterprise-based virtual machines to maximize application performance and make the best use of resources. The company’s decision engine dynamically analyzes demand from applications, containers, networks and virtual desktops and adjusts configuration, resource allocation and workload placement to meet service levels and business goals. Again, no formal partner program, but a spokesman says MSPs are using the product.

Why it’s interesting: SLAs — carriers give them out like candy, but do you know whether customers are getting what they pay for? With VMTurbo, partners can track performance and match it against guarantees.

HortonWorks is to Hadoop as Red Hat is to Linux; it makes the open database enterprise-friendly via support and front-end management. Its customer roster includes eBay, Spotify, Bloomberg and other large enterprises. The HortonWorks Data Platform provides data security, governance and management plus hooks into existing data warehouses and RDBMSes. The system can be run from the cloud, on-premises or in an appliance across both Linux and Windows; there are also capabilities for backing up data to Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3. Its partner program offers a pre-built and validated big data architecture.

Why it’s interesting: Hadoop is popular with financial services, health care and government verticals, and you can start small — the Hortonworks Sandbox is a single-node cluster in a virtual machine complete with step-by-step tutorials to get employees comfortable with the software.

BeyondTrust  is a security company focused on preventing insider privilege abuse and external attacks. The product suite is comprehensive and delivered via security appliances in four sizes, suitable for branch offices, midsize businesses or enterprise data centers. Partners get sales tools, extensive marketing collateral and technical assistance.

Why it’s interesting:  The product suite supports Windows, Unix, Linux and even OS X as well as networks, databases, mobile devices and virtual and cloud infrastructures.

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