More ways Red Hat is here to help

When we made the decision to move Red Hat Summit from a physical event in San Francisco to an online-only virtual experience, we also reconsidered what we put our focus on this week. 

We have several big product advancements and developments in our partner ecosystem to share with you, but we’ve decided to put our focus on what customers need most from us right now: understanding what Red Hat is doing to help them, and technology innovations that meet them where they are, whether that need is to move faster or to weather the storm. We’ll share more about those specific product innovations tomorrow and we look forward to telling you about our other exciting developments in the future.

A few weeks ago, I shared some of our initial efforts, including flexibility for Red Hat Training classes; extended expiration dates for all Red Hat Certifications set to expire between March 17 and Sept. 30, 2020; collaboration with Boston University on The Resiliency Challenge; expanded access to automation; best practices we’ve learned from our own distributed workforce; and more. 

Since — and even before — then, we’ve been working with customers to help them not just survive, but thrive. Today, we announced some examples that show how Red Hat technologies are enabling different facets of life in one country, spanning public and private sector, to enable core infrastructure optimization AND innovation. 

We are working with Edenor, Argentina’s largest electricity distributor, to help them - quite literally - keep the lights on in that country by enabling customers to report outages faster and for Edenor to more quickly get any issues routed to its field service team. And, Argentina’s Ministry of Health is using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies to transform and modernize its healthcare system and infrastructure. The Ministry of Health’s National Digital Health Network is vastly improving accessibility of universal healthcare coverage services and initiatives in the country — 2.4 million people are currently registered with 15 million expected by the end of this year. The system is critical: it’s being used to help keep Argentinians up-to-date on pandemic developments and track local and global COVID-19 cases. 

Those are just two examples - you’ll see more customers on the main stage at Red Hat Summit starting tomorrow talking about how we are supporting them and working together right now. I hope you can join us.

Today, we are announcing several additional initiatives, including:

• Technical Account Management (TAM) services for new customers billed at a 50% discount

• Extended product life cycles across portions of the Red Hat portfolio

• Free training for furloughed workers and job seekers

• Free online training courses on in-demand skills and technologies, available to everyone

Read on for more details on each of these initiatives.

TAM services for new customers billed at 50% discount 

You can think of TAMs as some of our customers’ secret weapons. They are seasoned professionals that serve as extended team members for customers, helping them get the most out of their Red Hat solutions. TAMs often work behind the scenes and in the trenches with our customers, helping to guide technology strategy, resolving potential problems before they occur, minimizing disruption and freeing customers to focus on their key business challenges.

Work from home and other mitigation strategies, along with supply chain disruption and fast pace innovation have exacerbated the need for customers to focus on optimizing their existing IT assets and/or accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Many are doing so with reduced or limited staff resources. This is where TAMs can help. 

We expect an increase in demand and we’re proud to share that we have talented Red Hat Customer Experience and Engagement and Consulting resources who will support customers as TAMs for the next 6-12 months to help our customers where they need us most right now. Stepping up is the Red Hat way and we’re proud of and thankful for these Red Hatters.

Extended product life cycles across portions of the Red Hat portfolio

Red Hat already has long and predictable life cycles to give customers more choice and flexibility in planning their IT initiatives. So that customers do not have to shift their focus away from near-term operations with planned migrations or upgrades, we are providing extensions to Red Hat products that would have had a hard end of maintenance (EOM) in the near future. This includes extended life cycles for certain versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Runtimes. 

Read more about the newly extended Red Hat product life cycles.

Free training for furloughed workers and job seekers

We know customers need IT talent to be successful. And yet, we also know that an unprecedented number of jobs have been impacted in the wake of COVID-19. We want to help impacted individuals gain the skills and knowledge that can help them find their next opportunity.

Industry studies show that some of the most in-demand job skills in IT include Linux, containers, Kubernetes, cloud, and Ansible. All of those skills are rooted in Linux, and IT professionals with a Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification are poised to master key technologies driving open hybrid cloud — an RHCSA is the gateway to acquiring key skills that are driving transformation. 

We hope we can help even more people gain the in-demand skills that will help them land a position in the IT industry, which is why we are making our RHCSA Linux learning path available for free to job-seekers in collaboration with SkillsBuild.org. Whether you are seeking job retraining, are a student entering the workforce and getting started in your career, or a seasoned IT professional, this training will be a fit for you. We are augmenting our content with content from other SkillsBuild.org content partners to make our Linux track viable for job-seekers with no or minimal IT background.

Learn more about how we are offering our RHCSA Linux learning path to job-seekers for free.

Free online training courses, available to anyone

Since the beginning of April, we have delivered more than 500,000 free Red Hat training courses, including:

• Red Hat OpenStack Technical Overview

• Developing Cloud-Native Applications with Microservices Architectures

• Deploying Containerized Applications Technical Overview

• Developing Red Hat Agile Integration Technical Overview

• Ansible Essentials: Simplicity in Automation Technical Overview

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Technical Overview

• Red Hat Satellite Technical Overview

• Virtualization and Infrastructure Migration Technical Overview

Now, we have added the self-paced, online Introduction to OpenShift Applications course at no cost until June 30, 2020. This course teaches any developer, regardless of Linux technical skills, how to take apps from their laptops into the cloud with Red Hat OpenShift. 

Learn more about free Red Hat training. If you are seeking new skills that can help you in your career, I hope you will take advantage of these offers.

Red Hat is here to help

These are just some of the new ways Red Hat remains here to help. As the world continues to adapt and recover, we plan to continue looking for ways we can help our employees, our customers, and our communities forge a path forward. We look forward to joining with all of you during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience and hearing about your organizations' plans, challenges and ideas for moving forward. 

Together, we’ll get to the other side of these unprecedented times. Take care of yourselves and one another.