Red Hat endeavours to strengthen association with partners by continuing to add value to their business

In a chat with VARINDIA, Neeraj Bhatia, Director - Channel and Partner Alliances, Red Hat India and South Asia discusses about the importance of channels, partner program and his expectation from channel ecosystem

The Red Hat Partner Program is designed to help our partners develop successful hybrid cloud practices and solutions to deal with evolving challenges that digitization entails. Our program offers a flexible structure designed to accommodate our partners’ individual business models while also providing them access to a variety of benefits that help develop our partners’ expertise and improve their capability to sell and deliver Red Hat technologies

With the key responsibility to develop a partner ecosystem, enabling their capabilities, empowering them to offer services and solutions to help their customers, Neeraj believes in leading with optimism and faith.

“I believe in “leading with optimism and faith so together we create an honest, transparent and passionate environment”. It is imperative for organizations to keep their people and ecosystem equipped and empowered with the latest skills, aligned to business needs, in order to meet market demands of today’s digital economy. In line with this, my key responsibilities are to develop the partner ecosystem, strengthen their capabilities, enabling them to build services and solutions to help their customers innovate faster and stay ahead of the competition. This also provides a career growth path to all Red Hat associates while building on Red Hat’s leading position as an enterprise open source technology to customers across all industries and segments.”

Channels

Red Hat believes in strategic partnership which ensures customer success. It aims to build partnerships which will help the company to deliver digital transformation the open source way. The partners of Red Hat helps the company to reach a wide range of customers. In the growth trajectory of Red Hat, partners play a crucial role.

“As technology advancements continue to disrupt business models, organizations need to adopt new technologies, such as cloud, integration, containers to transform their business and innovate. We at Red Hat, believe in strategic partnerships which are fundamental in ensuring our customers’ success. Our endeavour and motto is to “build partnerships that deliver digital transformation the open source way”, by enabling partners with the right skills and resources to provide solutions that speed development, testing, deployment & re-engineering thereby improving performance, and maximize return on investment for the enterprise customers. Our partner ecosystem allows Red Hat technology to be a part broad range of solutions and ultimately allows us to reach a larger customer base. We partner with OEMs (such as HPE, IBM and Cisco), Global System Integrators (TCS, Infosys, Accenture), ISVs (SAP, Mindgate, Intellect, FSS), and value-added partners like Taashee, Keen & Able, VDA Solutions, Sonata and Team Computers and many more. Therefore, partners play an integral role in our strategy to grow with both existing and new customers,” explains Neeraj.

Partner Program

Red Hat feels that there are tremendous opportunities for partners who can identify the hybrid cloud opportunity and build a service delivery capability. With the right skills and offerings partners can retain customers, grow their business and achieve higher returns as well as grow their customer base. For instance, partners skilled in the concepts of kubernetes, containerization, automation and mobility would be able to implement their expertise and foresight in making more informed transitions and fulfil the role of system integrators while providing services to their consumers.

“The Red Hat Partner Program is designed to help our partners develop successful hybrid cloud practices and solutions to deal with evolving challenges that digitization entails. Our program offers a flexible structure designed to accommodate our partners’ individual business models while also providing them access to a variety of benefits that help develop our partners’ expertise and improve their capability to sell and deliver Red Hat technologies. Our philosophy is for a dual role for partners where they are enabling solutions for customer as a systems integrator and (or) delivering solution frameworks while themselves consuming Red Hat Technologies as a service provider.

Our partner program, Red Hat Partner Connect offers a structured enablement and development path designed to accommodate the partners’ business models while also providing them access to a variety of benefits that help them develop expertise and increase their capability to sell and deliver Red Hat technologies. Our Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is designed to help our partners meet customer needs better, for cloud-based technologies. Another successful program we launched is the Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program, designed to better position SIs to meet customers’ increasing interest for containerized application development and platforms that can support cloud-native workloads to become more efficient in delivering innovative solutions,” elaborates Neeraj.

Expectation from Channel

The open source technology helps Red Hat to offer customer’s need in such a way which differentiates the company from competition. An increasing number of customers are embracing Red Hat offerings to transform business. Red Hat along its partners want to help more customers who are thinking to start their hybrid cloud journey. “Our endeavour is to strengthen our partnerships further by continuing to add value to their business by building capabilities and resources to address their customers’ needs better.

For Red Hat, Open source technology gives us the ability to deliver what our customers need in a way that differentiates us from our competitors. Application development teams using Red Hat OpenShift have, on average, three or four times more product deployments, equating to more features launching to our end users faster. Our investments in Kubernetes engineering and community leadership offer our customers confidence to unleash new application capabilities and digitally transform their business. With more and more customers embracing Red Hat OpenShift, we see this as the first milestone in a much bigger transformation happening across every industry. With this we want our partners to help open more doors with customers looking to start their hybrid cloud journey, we expect hybrid cloud strategy to gain traction in BFSI, ITES, MFG & distribution and IT Services (Captives and developers) in the region. As we support organizations in their digital transformation efforts, we will continue to add new channel partners to further the open hybrid cloud ecosystem,” says Neeraj.