Top Gun 51 Profile: Red Hat’s Scott Musson on IBM, Channel Strategy, More

As open source software continues to be devoured by business IT departments for a wide range of IT initiatives, the channel has been expanding its role to include more open source products and services.

Scott Musson, vice president of global strategic alliances at Red Hat, a Linux and open source software market leader, knows all about that trend.

Red Hat’s Scott Musson

Musson, who joined Red Hat in June of 2013 from VMware, has had a long background in IT channel relationships going back to his days with Compaq, HP, Dell and Tandem Computers. At Red Hat, Musson is responsible for Red Hat’s global alliance, system integrator and independent software vendor (ISV) relationships, while also managing the company’s strategic relationships with HP, IBM, Dell and Cisco.

As a Channel Partners Top Gun 51 Award winner, he recently spoke with Channel Futures about his work with the channel partner community and how Red Hat is continuing to drive and grow its business with its partners. Here is an edited version of that conversation:

Channel Futures: When and how did you start working with the channel?

Scott Musson: The channel stuff really started in 1999 when I went to Compaq after it acquired Tandem Computers in 1997. At Tandem, I was on the marketing side around the data warehousing business intelligence group. There I started working with ISV partners. When Compaq acquired Tandem, I shifted over to Compaq and went to work in the partner organization and became a student and a fan of the channel model.

CF: Did Compaq’s acquisition of Tandem Computing change your channel experiences?

SM: When I started looking at Compaq as a company, it was interesting to me to understand a company that basically started channel first and that was driving all its business using the channel leverage model, which maximizes the efficiency of different channels. It was super-efficient. I started talking to a bunch of the senior executives at Compaq about why this model worked — people like Bob Gregerson and other early channel pioneer folks in the technology industry. And it was just one of those things where I thought it just made so much sense that I wanted to be a part of that type of organization, and frankly, I’ve never left.

CF: What makes the IT channel such an interesting place for you to have spent so much of your career?

SM: It was really the synergy behind being able to use fewer resources in a leveraged model, kind of like a connect-one-to-many-pipes model where partners could invest in our business, our technology, our assets, our training and then go out and talk to customers without having to be physically present in front of a customer. It was the efficiency of the leverage model. It was the ability for us to drive a win-win scenario. So, partners were making money, we were making money, everybody was benefitting. It was really the efficiency and leverage that made it work.

CF: What has been your biggest accomplishment in terms of Red Hat and the channel since you joined the company in 2013?

SM: I would say broadening the definition of the channel. What I mean is historically we in the technology industry referred to the channel as those partners that resold our products and technologies. We’ve had a two-tier distribution model with distributors and resellers. We would put products into the system and people would go sell them. The work our team has been doing has been to …