Building expertise and driving emerging technology with Red Hat partners

Over the past few years, partners have played an increasingly important role in Red Hat’s success. Today, a significant portion of our business comes from our channel partners, who continue to be a key engine for our growth. They’ve helped us broaden our footprint around the world by introducing many enterprises to the benefits of Red Hat’s open source software solutions.

That success does not simply come naturally. It requires us to cultivate deep relationships with our channel partners and provide them with the resources, training, and information they need to be able to succeed when selling our technologies. After all, selling subscription-based open source software is unlike selling traditional licensed products. It requires in-depth knowledge and training -- not only of the technologies that use open source, such as hybrid clouds, virtualization, and more, but also the unique sales approaches for open source solutions.

This need for knowledge and training led us to create our Red Hat Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN) in 2013, which is the impetus for several new initiatives that we plan on introducing over the next year. When we first launched Red Hat OPEN, we did so with a single guiding principle: to provide business partners with a self-paced, online learning tool that makes it easier for them to learn how to more effectively sell and deliver Red Hat products and solutions.

With the Red Hat 2017 North America Partner Conference underway, I wanted to share a preview of several new offerings that we intend to roll out in the near future. Each of these will add new features to Red Hat OPEN and our other partner resources, and build on our commitment to providing our partners with the best possible training resources to help them succeed.

New tools designed to simplify the partner knowledge journey. We’ll be adding a public-facing catalog page to Red Hat OPEN where partners can view existing, new, and upcoming courses. They’ll also be able to highlight the training and skills they’ve earned through Red Hat OPEN Accreditations. Those who are logged onto Red Hat Connect for Business Partners, our business partner portal, will be able to jump directly into registering for Red Hat OPEN Accreditations and courses via a single click.

An enhanced user experience. We are also planning to unveil a redesigned Red Hat OPEN user experience that provides partners access to more content, including sales and technical training courses and hands-on labs around specific use cases. Various partner resources, including the Red Hat OPEN training system, Red Hat Product Demo System, and Red Hat Connect for Business Partners, will also be updated so that they’re easier-to-use and more flexible and reliable.

Expanded training resources with greater breadth and depth. Updates to training materials to provide partners with new, valuable, and easier ways to consume information. They’ll be able to view short, mobile-optimized training videos while on the go or offline, and have the option to request custom training clips relevant to their specific needs and covering a range of emerging technologies and use cases, including containers, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), and more. We’ll be enhancing the Red Hat Product Demo System with more capacity and new demos and use cases around modernized application development, IT optimization, cloud infrastructure, and IT integration. Finally, we’ll be introducing new content and resources designed specifically for solutions architects so they can better address their customers’ technical needs.

We’re looking forward to providing more information on these new resources in the weeks and months ahead. We’re confident that these offerings will be able to provide our partners with the tools, knowledge, and support they need to be successful.