Red Hat's virtualization strategy is gaining momentum. One key indicator: The open source software company has trained 400 professionals on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). But that's not all. Roger Egan (pictured), VP of North American Channels, has revealed several other milestones to The VAR Guy -- including plans for a Cloud Partner Symposium. Here's the update.

The VAR Guy

August 4, 2011

2 Min Read
Red Hat Certifies 400 Virtualization Professionals

Roger Egan

Red Hat‘s virtualization strategy is gaining momentum. One key indicator: The open source software company has trained 400 professionals on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). But that’s not all. Roger Egan (pictured), VP of North American Channels, has revealed several other milestones to The VAR Guy — including plans for a Cloud Partner Symposium. Here’s the update.

Egan sat down with The VAR Guy during CompTIA Breakaway, a channel conference held this week in Washington, D.C. Among the key takeaways: In its march toward $1 billion in annual revenues, Red Hat hopes to…

1. Rock VMware’s World: Frankly, this effort is going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort. VMware sales continue to accelerate, but Egan thinks Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) will eventually close ground and leapfrog VMware the way Linux leapfrogged Unix.

Toward that end, Egan said, Red Hat has trained 400 certified professionals on RHEV, which is built atop KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), an open source approach to virtualization.

2. Offer Private Cloud and Public Cloud Flexibility: Egan indicated that Red Hat’s so-called Delta Cloud initiative will be backed by Savvis, NTT, IBM and others. Here’s the strategy: Give IT vendors and corporations the same open source tools to build standardized public and private clouds. The potential result: A customer can potentially move a SaaS application from their own private cloud data center into a public cloud hosted by IBM or others.

The strategy sounds a bit like OpenStack. More thoughts on The VAR Guy’s sister site, Talkin’ Cloud, soon.

3. Middleware Meets the Mid-Market: Demand for Red Hat’s open source middleware platform, Egan says, continues to grow in the channel and in the mid-market. Red Hat has previously stated that partners typically earn $11 to $12 in consulting revenues for every dollar worth of JBoss subscriptions they sell.

“You’re going to see us double-down on the mid-market,” Egan said. “Especially in the mid-market.”

4. Cloud Partner Symposium: As part of Red Hat’s North America Partner Summit (Oct. 25-27, Miami), Red Hat will host a cloud symposium for VARs, integrators and cloud service providers that want a better feel for Red Hat’s strategy, Egan indicated.

Overall, Egan sounded quite upbeat — pointing out that multiple inflection points (the cloud, data center consolidation projects, etc.) have triggered growing demand for Red Hat’s growing software portfolio.

Reality Check

Still, toppling VMware in the virtualization market sounds like a really tall order. Generally speaking, it sounds like VMware still has better management tools than Red Hat’s offerings — though Red Hat is counting on its open source developer community to close that gap. And even if Red Hat can’t win big virtualization business, it sounds like customers are now using RHEV’s low cost to potentially gain price leverage when negotiating deals with VMware…

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