Red Hat Channel Program Earns GTDC Rising Star Award

Our channel strategy has attracted kudos recently as we have been awarded the Silver Rising Star Award by the GTDC, Global Technology Distribution Council, which is an industry consortium representing some of the world’s leading IT distributors. GTDC members drive more than $100 billion in annual worldwide sales of IT products, services and solutions through dynamic business channels, and Red Hat was awarded the Silver Rising Star award based on the growth rate of our revenue through our North American distribution partners during the past 12 months relative to our competitors, as tracked by The NPD Group, Inc.

This growth and industry recognition is a demonstration of our commitment to growing with our channel partners and making them a key component of Red Hat’s business. Recognition like this happens because of several factors; the quality and dedication of partners that recognize Red Hat’s value proposition, our recent investments in the Red Hat Partner Center, strategic changes to the channel program structure and the leadership of the Red Hat team.

From Q1 to Q2 we added 20% net new partners in North America who drove a significant portion of business forward for Red Hat. The feedback from these partners is that customers and end users want to be free from vendor lock-in and they want a reliable, scalable architecture backed by world-class support. This feedback is evidence that the Red Hat value proposition resonates with our partners and customers alike.

In June at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World we announced a brand-new online tool, the Red Hat Partner Center. This partner portal was designed to engage, train and communicate with our partners and to deliver information and resources on virtualization, middleware and cloud computing.

We also recently revamped the structure of the Red Hat Partner Program. We made strategic changes to help our partners become subject matter experts in platform, virtualization and middleware to enable them to become trusted partners to their customers with in-depth product knowledge and expertise.

All of these factors have combined to fuel the development of Red Hat’s business through channel partners. The Silver Rising Star Award is a further testament to the focus on our partner ecosystem, and the compelling value that Red Hat based solutions coupled with our partners’ technologies and services capabilities can offer.

Red Hat has made significant progress in becoming a more channel centric organization. We expect our sales engagement model and our future investment strategy to continue to be squarely focused on promoting growth with our partner ecosystem. We intend to continue investing in the resources, tools and programs that our partners need to help them drive success and value with Red Hat solutions.

For information about becoming a Red Hat Partner, visit /partners/.