In their annual partner program guide, CRN recognized Red Hat’s North America partner program with a 5-Star award. We believe this honor illustrates the successful program we have built and are extremely proud as we make it a priority to invest in our partners here at Red Hat. As technology continues to accelerate and businesses are facing complex issues around managing and operating their datacenter, navigating cloud computing and application modernization, we rely on our partners to use Red Hat solutions to solve these issues for their customers.

To empower our partners and continue to develop our partner program, we’re working to develop and invest in resources that will help them be successful. Specialized resources around areas including middleware, virtualization and cloud are being developed to help our partners gain the insight, knowledge and advanced skills needed to serve as a trusted-advisor to their customers. In addition to investing in partner enablement to help our partners build open source practices, we’re also working to develop the right incentives to reward our partners as they bring opportunities to Red Hat. These enhancements will not be selective, but for all partner types including Systems Integrators, ISVs and cloud partners.

Our ultimate goal is to create and foster an ecosystem that champions a collaborative partner community. We’re looking to our social media networks to help spur this collaboration and keep our partner community connected. But, to build a program that benefits our partners and encourages collaboration, we need feedback. Please engage with us, share with us and let us know how we can make it better. I know with the right resources in place and truly working together, we can handle the speed of innovation and solve any IT challenge our customers face.

Thank you to our partners for helping make Red Hat a 5-Star program and I look forward to another great year together.