Upgraded and Aligned: Partner Sales College

Last month at Everything Channel’s Xchange event we launched several key enhancements to the North American Partner Program. In order to better serve our partners and enable them to start and maintain a successful open source business practice we added a classification tier and three specialization areas.

The program will now include three product specializations; Infrastructure, Middleware and Virtualization. The goal of these additions is to benefit our partners and provide a deeper and more focused knowledge base for these three solution sets. Each specialization requires partners to maintain at least two Channel Sales Certified employees in the area of expertise and either a Red Hat Certified Technician or a JBoss Certified Application Administrator.

As part of our focus and investment in our partner ecosystem we have enhanced the online training courses for our partners that are designed to help them achieve and maintain the new specialization designations. We are proud to announce that since July 1st our partners have already completed over 2300 hours of online training as part of our new online Partner Sales College .

The Partner Sales College is intended to streamline the process for partners to gain certification and valuable knowledge in any one of the three specialization areas, and the online courses map to the newly launched North American Partner Program, including tiers and specializations. The new, standardized partner sales training applies worldwide to any partner at any level, anywhere in the world.

This training aims to help our partners easily and accurately articulate the Red Hat value proposition. The course curriculum includes enhanced content to provide more robust middleware and platform training for our partners. Through the Partners Sales College participants will get an in-depth overview of Red Hat’s entire solution portfolio, enhancing their ability to better serve their customers, drive additional margins, services, and opportunities.

Currently, the new Partner Sales College program has two paths and corresponding certifications:

• Platform / Infrastructure: Red Hat Partner Platform Certified Sales Person (RHPPCS)

• Middleware: Red Hat Partner Middleware Certified Sales Person (RHPMCS)

• And the virtualization path is coming soon.

To sign up today for the Red Hat Partner Sales College, visit the Partner Center. Stay tuned for more information about how we are increasing our investment in our partner ecosystem and helping our partners to succeed with open source.