Throughout the week, we’ve been celebrating our Red Hat Innovation Award winners and the innovative ways they’re using Red Hat technologies to tackle some of their most pressing IT challenges. As a judge for the Innovation Awards this year, I can attest to the time we take to understand the challenges our winners faced, and the solutions they came up with to overcome them.

It has been a wonderful learning experience, and through the process I’ve realized:

  • Every company has to drive innovation while at the same time maintain and improve the customer experience.
  • Every transformation wasn’t just an IT transformation. Business, IT, and development collaborated and used agile methods from open source.
  • Companies want to provide a seamless customer experience, independent of the engagement channel (i.e. phone, in-person, digital).
  • Each company worries about having the right data and the right place to make the right decisions.
  • Companies need partners like Red Hat, who exist in an open and agile world, to help execute their ideas.
  • Companies don’t want to be locked in, especially as they are just now able to drop the shackles of legacy hardware.

As I reflect on these, I believe they ultimately speak to the value of a Red Hat subscription.

More than technology

For Red Hat, technology has always been a core component of our ability to help others innovate. But it’s more than just Red Hat’s technology that provides value. It’s about the development process, relationships, and partners we have, not only with our customers, but with upstream communities and the broader ecosystem of contributors and partners.

Amadeus, for example, is a leading transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, providing advanced technology solutions to their clients. They needed a technology solution that would let customers -- like travel agencies, corporations, airlines, airports, hotels, and railways -- access content and travel tools from a single source, which would help them respond quickly and reliably to consumer demand. By collaborating with Red Hat and having us focus on the operating system and orchestration, Amadeus could put its container application platform to work for their business.

Successful adoption

The applications and infrastructure that companies need to run are changing at a rapid rate. That’s why Red Hat services enables customers to be successful in the adoption of new technologies, during and post sales cycles. We strive to create a seamless customer experience by understanding that our customers’ business needs are key to their success. This past year, we worked with Paddy Power Betfair, one of the world’s largest international online sports betting providers, to embrace new open source technologies (including OpenStack) and provide agile, flexible application development, testing, and deployment across their key offerings. Through pilot phase and production, Red Hat and Paddy Power Betfair’s collaboration and close communication through our Technical Account Manager (TAM) offering led to Paddy Power Betfair’s success through new feature development and bug fixes.

Plan and influence the future

Emerging technology advocacy, adoption, and support is top of mind for us. We want companies to succeed with our new products and offerings. We know it’s difficult to plan when the future is unclear, but with a Red Hat subscription, customers have insight into our product roadmaps so they can plan better. Furthermore, Red Hat customers can influence that roadmaps based on their business needs.

Tools you need

Just like our customers, we must also innovate constantly to make sure we can provide the best possible experience. Our Red Hat Customer Portal has had a constant focus on innovation for our clients. I’m happy to share that recently it was recognized as one of "The Year's Top Ten Best Web Support Sites" by The Association of Support Professionals, for the sixth year in a row.

From our award-winning Customer Portal, knowledgebase, Product Security Center, and more, a Red Hat Subscription helps position you on the right track to get the most out of your Red Hat solutions. We offer complete life cycle support, certifications, and no-lock-in.

A true partner will give you the confidence to innovate and succeed, and Red Hat is serious about enabling the success of our customer and partners. To show this commitment, we are introducing a new program this year, the Customer Success Program. This program will enable us to help customers achieve their targeted business outcomes faster by helping them to maximize the impact of their Red Hat subscription. Through continuous engagement and timely delivery of tailored resources, content, and tools, Red Hat Customer Success Program is designed to strengthen our collaboration to help customers effectively deploy and manage technical deployments and strategically plan for the future.

At the end of the day, we want customers and partners to know that when they have a Red Hat subscription, they can rest easy. We have your back.


About the authors

Marco Bill-Peter is the senior vice president of Customer Experience and Engagement (CEE) at Red Hat. CEE is responsible for increasing the value customers and partners receive from their relationship with Red Hat. In addition to technical support delivery and strategic customer engagement, Bill-Peter's organization is responsible for the award-winning Red Hat Customer Portal, quality engineering, DevOps, product certifications, product security, product documentation, and translation services.

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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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