Quick: Name the biggest reseller of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The answer very likely is Dell. Now, the PC giant is striving to become the largest reseller of Red Hat’s JBoss open source middleware. Here’s how.

Dell and Red Hat are teaming up for a customer luncheon on April 8 in Boston. Rob Cardwell, VP of middleware technology at Red Hat, will describe why JBoss middleware — running on industry standard hardware; wink, wink — is far more cost effective than closed-source alternatives.

Sources say the Dell-Red Hat luncheon is part of a larger go-to-market strategy that will accelerate Dell’s push beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux into JBoss middleware.

Same Story, Different City

The VAR Guy has heard this story before, and it’s pretty compelling. Red Hat’s JBoss sales are growing faster than the company’s Linux platform sales. Also, JBoss has been a hit with channel partners, which typically earn around $11 in consulting fees for every dollar’s worth of JBoss they sell.

Roughly 60 percent of Red Hat’s annual sales come from partners, according to The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50 research report. Nearly 40,000 partners and IT managers are certified to on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With all of those factors in mind, Dell sees JBoss as an obvious next move in the software market.

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