This past quarter was one of continued momentum for Red Hat and our partners, specifically when it comes to containerization. It’s clear that hybrid cloud is becoming the new normal for many global enterprises, but with that comes inherent complexities. Red Hat partners are at the forefront of this hybrid cloud revolution and often the drivers for innovation and growth with customers. We continue to hear from partners that containerized solutions are increasingly important to customers, especially those in the mid-market that need to scale quickly across different environments. 

We recently announced the availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, and soon after Red Hat was named a leader in multicloud container development platforms. The latest version of OpenShift helps organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over distributed resources. For our partners, this means they can offer customers streamlined, full-stack automation and support deployments from different clouds to on-premises to the edge. 

At Red Hat, we are always talking to our partners about ways we can collaborate and address individual customer needs. Every customer is one of a kind, and our partners are tasked with providing unique, innovative solutions to generate meaningful business outcomes. This can be a challenge given the rate at which the industry is evolving and the growing complexity of customer IT environments. My advice to partners is this: when faced with these challenges, take a step back and think about the entire stack you’re deploying. It’s not just about providing services and training resources, which are undoubtedly important, but it’s about actually applying the technology to unlock business opportunities and innovation for customers. 

Red Hat OpenShift is designed to do the heavy lifting by providing a reliable, scalable platform to build applications. With this, our partners can focus on helping customers develop and deploy applications while also shortening the sales cycle and creating a future-proof environment for customers. 

I encourage all of our partners to reach out to their Red Hat team with questions, concerns and feedback. Meaningful, open conversations are critical to problem-solving and fueling open source innovation. We are here to support the partner ecosystem, because at Red Hat, we believe that success is achieved together not apart. 

Learn more about the channel opportunity with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes in our latest Channel Watch webinar


About the author

Ernest Jones is Vice President of North America Commercial Partners & Alliances. In his role, Jones is responsible for the development of strategic relationships across the Red Hat partner ecosystem to extend Red Hat's customer base. Ernest previously acted in leadership roles at Oracle and IBM overseeing cloud solutions sales and services. Most recently, he served as the co-founder and Chief Operations & Revenue Officer at vVents.com, an enterprise live-streaming cloud-based platform focused on maximizing sales channels via live video.

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