Bigger Opportunity for Channel Partners

On Monday we made a significant announcement that we believe will have a positive and lasting impact on our Red Hat partner community. We announced that we will be working together with Microsoft to ensure interoperability of our respective virtualization platforms. Both companies signed straightforward certification and validation agreements indicating that we would join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program, which means ultimately our customers and partners win.

The IT world that we serve today is heterogeneous and no other group knows this better than our partner community. Our channel partners are called on to find the right combination of solutions for their customers that simply work, and in many instances that means an integration of both proprietary and open source solutions. With Monday’s announcement we enhanced the value of Red Hat’s infrastructure platform for our channel partners. By allowing Windows Server to run as a guest on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization technologies, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run as a guest on Windows Hyper-V, partners will be able to bring a new level of compatibility, interoperability and support to their customers around virtualization technologies.

Ultimately our partners will be able to take advantage of a broader set of solutions that should impact their bottom line. These interoperability agreements will allow our partners to leverage a value discussion about migration approaches that will incorporate all of the values that Red Hat’s complete product portfolio of solutions provides to our clients; cost reduction, flexibility, scalability, security, reliability and supported interoperability in a virtualized environment.

Learn more about Red Hat’s channel program, http://www.redhat.com/partners/ and listen to the webcast on the Red Hat and Microsoft announcement.