Red Hat Partner Conference focused on Emerging Technologies 

Red Hat APAC Partner Conference focused on how open source is gaining ground by upholding partner success and updates on emerging technologies. Red Hat, the leading provider of open-source solutions organized a two-day partner conference at the Westin Resort Nusa Dua, Bali (Indonesia) from 10th to 12th July, 2018 drawing more than 300 of Red Hat’s partners, distributors, system integrators, ISVs, OEMs and solution providers to the popular tourist destination.
Red Hat uses community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. With a global presence in 90+ offices in 35 countries, Red Hat has a strong footprint. 

The event kicked off with keynote presentations by Red Hat executives, including Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Red Hat Asia Pacific; Arun Oberoi, Executive Vice-President for Global Sales & Services; and Mark Enzweiler, Senior Vice President, Global Channel Sales and Alliances, Red Hat. Other eminent speakers included Sandra Ng, Group Vice-President of IDC’s Asia-Pacific Practice Group, Saul Caganoff, Principal & CTO, Platform Engineering, Deloitte Consulting and David Robinson, Chief Technology Officer, STT Connect. The event attracted partners from across the Asia-Pacific region and was highly sought after by convention bureaus keen to grow their corporate events sector, who gave insights into the partner landscape and market opportunities in the region. The conference provided a platform for partners to exchange ideas, spark meaningful discussions and network directly with Red Hat leaders and the partner ecosystem.

“Our customers’ success is our success” 

As digital transformation continues to be the top of business priorities in Asia Pacific with more enterprises leveraging platform technologies such as cloud, mobile, big data and social, coupled with organizational innovation to create new ways of doing business business environments are becoming volatile. Organizations will have to ensure that their IT is agile enough to configure for change without necessarily knowing what the change will be. This is the golden age for open source to unlock the full potential of digital transformation to achieve sustainable growth and profitability, while achieving agility and flexibility in innovation. 

With the theme “Stronger Together”, the 2018 Red Hat Partner Conference Asia-Pacific aimed to not only connect the partner ecosystem, but also provided the knowledge and expertise to better grow their business with Red Hat.

For 25 years, Red Hat has provided open source solutions to solve complex problems across industries –including financial services, telcos and governments – by bringing people together to collaborate. Red Hat celebrated these 25 years and acknowledged the role of its partners, who played a key role in the company’s success story. Partners have been an important multiplier for Red Hat and are important for the company’s future. Partners such as Deloitte, Intel, STT Connect and Microsoft talked about the growth of open source across the globe and how they developed a winning business strategy with Red Hat solutions.

At the conference, it was shared that ISVs such as BoCloud, UEC Group Ltd, Yusys Technologies, EAB Systems, Monoplus and Biqmind are  now offering solutions based on Red Hat OpenShift to help companies in the Financial Services, IT and Oil & Gas sectors to accelerate their innovation journey. The ISVs showcased an increasing adoption of Red Hat OpenShift, which was built on open-source innovation and standards including Kubernetes, the container orchestration engine, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is trusted by many companies around the world. It provided a more secure and stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current investments, enabling mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

Mark Enzweiler, Senior Vice President, Global Channel Sales and Alliances, Red Hat, says, “Our partners solve customer challenges with innovative and supportive IT solutions from Red Hat. Partners with their own technologies test and certify their offerings on the Red Hat portfolio of products. Furthermore, we host programs like Red Hat Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN) to help them succeed.”

“Also, it is important to talk about our partners when we talk about Red Hat because they have helped us become the world’s leading provider of open-source solutions. In June, we announced our first quarter earnings for FY19, and we’ve had 65 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. For FY18, we attributed 72 percent of our bookings through the channel.”

Red Hat aims to build OpenShift “Practice Builder” Program

Red Hat launched the OpenShift Practice Builder Program in the Asia Pacific region, describing it as a new initiative designed specifically for system integrators (SIs). The program aims to help SIs to build and monetise a modern cloud-native application development and delivery practice using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware.

“System integrators are the key to helping Asia-Pacific companies innovate through the development of new cloud and container-enabled applications, as well as modernising existing applications,” says Josep Garcia, VP, Asia-Pacific Partners and Alliances, Red Hat Asia-Pacific. He added, “The next big wave of opportunity with Red Hat is moving to application-based solutions like Ansible, OpenShift and OpenStack Platform. OpenShift provides a single platform for customers to manage and automate containers across environments, supported by a cloud migration strategy.”

Sandra Ng, group vice president, Practice Group, IDC Asia Pacificsaid, “Customers are looking for ideas, co-creation capabilities and new technology skills to develop new business models and to transform processes. The ecosystem partnerships that can overcome the digital transformation deadlocks of silos of innovation, lack of digital expertise and tactical plans for customers will perform well. In the digital transformation economy, partnerships are a key element to innovate, compete and grow.”

Global systems integrators including Accenture, Atos, DXC, HCL and Wipro have already built skills and solutions on Red Hat’s technology to address their customer’s needs and nowthe Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program aims to help SIs in the Asia Pacific region to more quickly build expertise on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes container application platform.

The new OpenShift Practice Builder Program was developed by Red Hat in conjunction with the company’s  System Integrator community, with several Asia-Pacific SIs, including NTT Data in Japan, Wipro in India, Sino-Bridge in China and Integral and ANATAS in Australia, all involved in building the program.

When Red Hat acquires companies and if they are not on open source it stands committed to open-sourcing their technology. For example, CoreOS a recent acquisition has most of its offerings already on open source today and now Red Hat plans to open source the rest. CoreOS’s mission is “to improve the security and reliability of the Internet” by enabling “companies to run their applications securely and reliably in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and help IT organizations to support  cloud-native applications through the deployment of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds, Agile application development through the DevOps practice.

Neeraj Bhatia, Director – Channel and Partner Alliances – Red Hat, India and South Asia, says, “In today’s technology era, organizations are upgrading their IT infrastructure and implementing virtualization and cloud computing solutions to improve business agility and cost efficiency. Open source is one of the only enterprise software technology platforms that offers true choice and integrated technology to embrace the ever evolving digital economy. The data says, three out of one server imported is into open source. Very soon, it is going to be a 50:50 ratio.”

Owing to the several benefits it offers, the open environment is in demand and every single enterprise has seen the ways of doing business to bring innovation faster to market. The key sectors that are driving the growth of open data centers are BFSI, telecom, IT, social media and e-governance initiatives. The primary advantage that open-source technologies bring to data centers is standardization.

Open source has now become the key driver in the design, implementation and management of new generation data centers. It also helps in increasing interoperability and ensure smooth, agile and efficient service delivery. With the increased use of cloud-based infrastructure, there is even more demand for standardized applications and operating environments which are open source in nature. 

With the government’s open-source policies for initiatives such as Digital India, Make in India and other various important projects being run on open source, massive amount of data is being generated which needs proper data center solutions.

Red Hat’s business partners play an important role in educating customers and guiding them through this transformation to be a truly digital era business. 

Partner Testimony

Varad Gupta
CTO, Keen & ABLE Computers

“Red Hat follows open-source principle. There are many companies which claim that they are open source but when you use their products you see an enterprise version which is priced differently. Red Hat does not do this. All of Red Hat’s products are available on open source as enterprise or non enterprise.  
Today, Red Hat as a leader in open source is quite an accepted brand. The only challenge the company faces is that on the application development front, where availability of skilled resources is a limitation.This is where Red Hat works closely with its partners under Red Hat Partner Connect Program to skill and upskill.  But on the infrastructure front, cloud or container the battle is won. 

The Red Hat support is 24/7 but the differentiating factor is  the not just case base support but also the break/fix support. Based on  Red Hat’s support, customers can now ask “I am planning to do this and this is how I am planning to design my solution, so will this work? Red Hat provides feedback to such questions and clarifications and this offers a lot more value than the  traditional break/fix support. Under the  Red Hat support umbrella, a customer can upload these kinds of questions on Red Hat Global Support Services (GSS) which is more of asking for a design guideline.”      

Manojkummar Garg
COO, Taashee Linux Services 

“We have been associated with Red Hat for the last ten years. We not only have core competency on the services front but also on the entire stack of Red Hat from server to the cloud. Also, we sell a lot of Red Hat subscriptions. In the first year, we sold around 1,000K but in a span of 10 years we have grown and are selling around 8 million of Red Hat subscriptions. So we are growing by leaps and bounds. With the sale of subscriptions, services will come by default. 

As we sell the subscriptions, we get a back-end support by Red Hat on the onsite implementation or any first level support we handle. We are always backed by the Red Hat GSS support. 

Every year, 95% of our customer licences get renewed.Year-on-year growth of our company is almost 50%, and last year we did a business of Rs 100 crore. 
Telcos, data centers, manufacturing, BFSI are the verticals where we are witnessing the pull. We are growing with new emerging products as earlier Red Hat was only about OS (Operating System). Then it introduced Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Server and added on new products. So the opportunity is vast.”  
          

Concluding the APAC Partner Conference, Red Hat has embarked on a slew of reinforcements to strengthen their commitment to their partner ecosystem and provide them with knowledge and expertise to better grow their business with Red Hat. Partners will now be able to better advise their customers on the solutions that are necessary to accelerate their digital transformation and thrive in a complex business environment.