Technical Account Manager: Your partner in execution and conduit into Red Hat

Prior to working at Red Hat, I spent many years working in large organizations as a Systems & Database Admin. I have experienced all of the pressures and issues that I see IT Support teams experiencing today: troubleshooting, performance, outages, architecting new platforms, applying best practices and learning new technology.

While working with vendors during a product pilot, it was easy to get responses to questions or a meeting for further discussion. However, once the sale was closed, the relationship often changed. As a guy in the trenches, I typically did not experience a strong ongoing relationship with the vendor once the product was implemented. Instead, I could open a support ticket with the vendor’s global support and hope for the best. No one I knew looked forward to opening a support case with any vendor.

Today as a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), I am proud to say that Red Hat’s leadership understands this and recognizes that providing a fantastic support experience is one of the most important offerings we provide. It is a fact that all of Red Hat’s products are derived from open source community projects where the source code is freely available, and Red Hat provides many software engineers to partner with these communities to further innovate, develop and enhance open source solutions. However, a critical value our customers receive from their Red Hat subscription is their support experience while implementing our products and resolving any potential issues.

The Red Hat support organization is named Customer Experience & Engagement (CEE) because we recognize that the full value that we must provide to our customers is more than just opening a support case. We spend a tremendous amount of energy to find better ways to engage, educate and support our customers. Examples of these will be covered in greater detail in later blog posts, including Red Hat Customer Convergence events, Access Labs, Red Hat Insights, Customer Portal documentation, technical discussions, and demos.

The Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) service is an important way that we are able to deeply engage and establish relationships with our customers by providing a tailored support experience that is unique to their needs. As a Red Hat TAM, I am able to serve as an advocate for, and extension of, my customers’ teams inside of Red Hat to aid my customers in achieving their objectives. Collaborating often with other TAMs and support engineers to provide access to a breadth of experience and specialized experience. I act as a conduit not only into Red Hat’s support teams (of which the TAM is a member of), but also as a gateway to Product Management and Engineering as well. Because of our unique tie between these three organizations, we are able to provide a unique experience and add to the relationships that our Sales and Solution Architects have already cultivated.

Key Benefits of a TAM

• Gain a direct relationship with a senior technical resource (RHCE or RHCA qualified) who has in-depth knowledge of your technical environment

• Regular sync and review calls (weekly, bi-monthly, as desired)

• Two on-site technical reviews per year

• Prevent issues before they arise with proactive planning and technical reviews (TAM engagement Menu)

• Gain visibility into current and future Red Hat products to plan for and meet your long-term technology goals

• Receive priority access to product feature requests and fixes

• Enhance the resources of your organization to gain efficiency in the operational execution of your technology initiatives

• Build a relationship with an adviser and advocate through regularly scheduled review meetings

Use of the TAM service may vary significantly depending on the nature of your business, geographical spread, and use of Red Hat technologies. The TAM service is generally packaged according to the following criteria:

• Per region: The TAM service is region-based and is purchasable for each primary Red Hat region. Red Hat primary regions are defined as North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.

• Global TAM: 3 TAM resources who are geographically located in each of the primary regions.

• Per Red Hat product line: Due to the technical nature of the TAM offering and the diversity of the Red Hat product portfolio, the TAM service is purchasable with multiple specialties of focus:

  • Platform (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, Ansible by Red Hat)

  • Application platforms (Red Hat JBoss Middleware or Red Hat Mobile Application Platform)

  • Cloud (Red Hat OpenStack Platform or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform)

  • Storage (Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage)

  • SAP

Stay tuned to this blog channel to hear more from our TAMs around the globe. We are very excited about sharing additional technical information and examples with you.

Terry Bowling is a TAM in the NA Central region. He has been migrating workloads from UNIX to Linux since 1998 and has supported business environments for major telecom and pharmaceutical companies. Most recently he has been focused on enabling our customers to migrate to container platforms using Red Hat Atomic and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, as well as adopting SAP HANA.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/terry_bowling #RHTAM

A Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) is a specialized product expert who works collaboratively with IT organizations to strategically plan for successful deployments and help realize optimal performance and growth. The TAM is part of Red Hat’s world-class Customer Experience and Engagement organization and provides proactive advice and guidance to help you identify and address potential problems before they occur. Should a problem arise, your TAM will own the issue and engage the best resources to resolve it as quickly as possible with minimal disruption to your business.