The business value of a Red Hat Technical Account Manager

As organizations pursue technologies to help them digitally transform their operations, it becomes increasingly clear how important the human side of this process is. With virtualization, cloud computing, containers and many other tools available to speed innovation, there is pressure to change while maintaining a stable and secure environment--which takes a special kind of expertise. It highlights for us the importance of Red Hat’s variety of support and service offerings.

Technical Account Management is designed to help customers successfully deploy and manage Red Hat technologies. Our technical account managers (TAMs) have been delivering personalized, proactive support to customers for more than 10 years, so we sought to gain a deeper understanding of the impact they're having. For insight into what a TAM does, check out A Day in the Life of a TAM.

To answer this, Red Hat commissioned a study with IDC on The Business Value of Red Hat Technical Account Management. IDC interviewed 13 global, diverse customers who average nearly 180,000 employees and an IT staff of just more than 1,000. Participants from around the globe spanned organizations in the public sector, as well as industries like finance, transportation, telecommunications, education, insurance and retail. These customers support an average of 980 servers, 2,549 virtual machines, and 353 applications.

The study found that working with a Red Hat TAM helped these organizations realize significant benefits by leveraging TAM services to optimize their existing Red Hat IT infrastructure and application development environments. Study participants specifically mentioned how working with a TAM provides these benefits:

• Improving operating models by converting manual processes to automated.
• Optimal availability of a main point of contact into Red Hat.
• Quick support and escalation to more quickly troubleshoot and solve problems.
• Direct access to the right technical resources within Red Hat.

The study also uncovered these key statistics:

• Working with a Red Hat TAM can result in a 432% three-year ROI.
• Those working with a TAM can payback in just two months.
• IT staff impact:
  • 43% more productive IT infrastructure management teams
  • 32% more productive application management
  • 40% faster deployment of new server resources
• Performance, reliability, and business impact:
  • 24% more efficient IT security teams
  • 93% reduction in unplanned downtime
  • 43% faster to market with new products/services
  • 10% more productive end users

Ultimately, IDC found that having a Red Hat TAM resulted in a 432% three-year ROI among those surveyed. TAMs are readily available to help customers with in-depth product knowledge, assistance with new technology, and solving issues more efficiently and providing application migration support.

Red Hat Technical Account Managers are technical, product specialists who proactively partner with organizations to help them achieve operational excellence with Red Hat enterprise solutions. The results of this IDC study suggest to us that a TAM is well worth the investment.