The Red Hat Accelerators wear many fedoras

Building community and serving our customers is a huge part of Red Hat. Not only do we encourage customers to get involved, but we also create and foster various opportunities where it’s possible to do so. A perfect example of this is Red Hat Accelerators, which launched as an established way to serve passionate enterprise customers who wanted to share and engage with each other around relevant IT issues, remedies, and solutions. It enables Red Hat to form deeper and more engaging relationships with its customers, serving as an overall connection point between practitioners, their network, and Red Hat.

With Red Hat Accelerators, there’s a strong sense of community that benefits practitioners to expand their knowledge and expertise, offer a voice to influence Red Hat offerings, and a seat at the table during industry events. Check out a few examples of how Red Hat Accelerators have been involved since the program’s inception.

Red Hat's open hybrid cloud portfolio

By working across Red Hat’s product portfolio, Accelerators are able to gain extensive exposure to new technologies, sometimes before general availability, hearing from and giving feedback to Red Hat’s product management and engineering teams. As the program has grown, so has Red Hat’s portfolio, now spanning hybrid cloud technologies for everything from management to cloud-native application development.

Some examples of where Red Hat Accelerators have engaged with Red Hat’s Products and Technologies teams:

• Two years ago, the Accelerators program worked closely with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL), the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. With each new version of RHEL, Accelerators could be among the first to beta test its new features and also provide feedback before general availability. 
• Earlier this year, Accelerators beta tested OpenShift Virtualization, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift that supports mixed applications running on virtual machines and containers. 
• Accelerators recently helped Red Hat’s UXUI Design Engineer team by providing feedback on the user interface for an upcoming Red Hat Satellite version, providing input on enhancements designed to improve our customers’ experiences. Accelerators have also participated in briefings to learn about other innovations in Red Hat’s Management portfolio, including Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Engage directly with Red Hat leadership

Red Hat Accelerators have the opportunity to join briefings and other sessions, hearing from and sharing with teams from across the company, including engineers, marketing, product managers, executives and more. These in-depth discussions and forums have included opportunities to engage with Red Hatters like Chris Wright (senior vice president and CTO),  Stefanie Chiras (senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and Paul Cormier (Red Hat’s president and CEO). 

Forming deeper relationships with customers means engaging Red Hatters from every direction, so customers in the Accelerators program can pick their brains and access candid, unfiltered information on any topic, big or small (or hybrid).

Build your skills on Red Hat technologies and beyond

There is more opportunity in the day-to-day to get involved and expand professional portfolios depending on Accelerators’ interests, such as blogging and social media, and Red Hat Training benefits to help Accelerators on the path to Red Hat certification.

In the past, we’ve been excited to see Accelerators participate at Red Hat events in meaningful ways. They’ve joined us at Red Hat Summit, the premier enterprise open source technology event attending together on site as a unit, with options for special seating for keynotes and early selection for sessions and labs, and participating in booth experiences with the Command Line Heroes team and Fedora Community. During our AnsibleFest events, Accelerators have spoken in sessions about automation and their Ansible Automation Platform deployments, and even participated in interviews with theCUBE. Even as this year’s global challenges incited events to transition into virtual platforms this year, Accelerators continue to play a valuable role through conversing in chat rooms, attending discussions, and participating in speaking sessions.

Red Hat Accelerators gives an opportunity for customers to discover what’s most important in their careers, from the products they use to the network they want to build and sustain. The reasons people join the program may vary, but the shared passion we find across Accelerators inspires us, as we build out the program further.  

If being exposed to products across Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio and a meaningful community of like-minded technology enthusiasts sounds exciting to you, you can apply to join or simply learn more about the Red Hat Accelerators program here. I look forward to engaging with you soon!