Red Hat Partner Conference North America: 8 Trends to Watch
At Red Hat Partner Conference North America (Jan. 14-16, San Diego), watch for CEO Jim Whitehurst and Channel Chief Roger Egan to describe how the company’s growing portfolio of software (Linux, storage, virtualization, middleware and hybrid cloud management) empowers channel partners. The big question: Are partners ready to diversify into all those new areas with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)? Hmmm… Chatting ahead of the conference, one of our Top 100 Channel Partner Events of 2013, Egan offered key perspectives to The VAR Guy earlier today. Here are eight takeaways from the conversation.
1. Executive Leadership: This is more than Egan’s show. CEO Whitehurst, Executive VP Paul Cormier, Executive VP Arun Oberio and GM Paul Smith will be on hand to describe the complete Red Hat story.
“Arun’s perspective will be very important,” said Egan. “As you’ve seen from our earnings announcements and acquisitions, we’re not the same company we were five or six years ago, or even 12 months ago. From storage to the recent acquisition of ManageIQ, we need to pull together our partners and enable them.”
Egan says Red Hat’s executive team is committed to that enablement. A prime example: CEO Whitehurst has been on the road with Egan and other channel leaders in recent weeks, hosting private partner roundtables to better understand partner opportunities and challenges.
2. Product and Partner Diversity: Egan says Red Hat’s alliance relationships with big OEMs (i.e., server makers), global systems integrators and regional systems integrators are “coming closer and closer together. And the reseller partners are getting more and more invested.”
Egan said roughly 500 people (including 175 partners) will be on-hand at the conference. Those partners are starting to cross-sell and up-sell across Red Hat’s growing software portfolio, which includes:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
- Red Hat JBoss Middleware
- Red Hat Storage
- Red Hat CloudForms (IaaS)
- Red Hat OpenShift (PaaS)
- ManageIQ: An enterprise cloud management and automation platform that Red Hat recently acquired.
3. Don’t Ignore Linux: “People forget our core Linux business, which started all this stuff, is still growing at astronomical rates,” said Egan. “It will take us some time to enable partners to [sell each of the] emerging products. These are products that need to be sold” by educated partners.
4. The New Guy: Oberio arrived in May 2012 and his focus on partners was immediate. “He comes with a tremendous amount of experience, technical knowledge and know-how to take our business to a multi-product company,” noted Egan. In addition to experience at HP and IBM, Oberio has “small company and startup background. The first thing he asked in our first meeting was ‘how are you engaging partners?”
5. Open Hybrid Cloud: That’s one of the big themes at the conference, which will attract everyone from alliance partners to resellers, cloud services providers, hosting providers and ISVs. And yes, telcos will be in the house too. “Obviously, we’re dealing with a lot of the telcos and cloud services providers,” he added.
6. Datacenter Infrastructure and Application Infrastructure: Red Hat plans to help partners build business practices around those two areas, Egan mentioned.
7. Cloud Tools: “There’s a lot of buzz around OpenShift,” said Egan. “The idea of being able to really develop new applications in a flexible environment is incredibly appealing to people.” Egan said to expect some news and views involving both OpenShift and CloudForms, and Red Hat also has some interest in OpenStack. “Put ManageIQ on top of all that, and Paul [Cormier] will have a lot of compelling things to talk about.”
8. No Lock-In: “I think our strategy of openness is brilliant,” said Egan. “And that’s not just me talking; it’s recognized in the market.”
How recognized? The VAR Guy will listen closely for answers, which may emerge at Red Hat Partner Conference North America.
