LAS VEGAS – Sitting between Red Hat’s two main lines of business (infrastructure and application development) is storage. Known for being an open source pioneer, Red Hat storage usually does not get the limelight, but that is changing.
Recently, more than 20 North American channel partners including two based in Canada are now accredited to sell Red Hat software-defined storage solutions, Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage.
And, Ranga Rangachari, the vice president and GM of storage and big data business unit for Red Hat, told CDN his division already has more than 15 technical alliances with high profile vendors such as Cisco Systems, Dell EMC, Intel, QCT, Seagate, the semiconductor arm of Samsung and Taiwanese/California-based server, storage and blade manufacturer Supermicro.
Things are changing for Rangachari’s unit because Red Hat storage was primarily sold directly to the end user. The company will still maintain a direct sales force, however its focus is now channel. Rangachari said direct sales would stick to large customers only.
“What we have done is broadened the route to market across four key routes: OEM, Embedded, ISVs and channel partners,” he said.
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To support this effort, Red Hat is opening up its software-define storage portfolio to the channel including more agile container-based and cloud environments.
Ben Cherian, director of partnerships, alliances, channel storage for Red Hat, said accreditation with Ceph and Gluster storage may fit different use cases so both areas are covered with this new program in areas such as engineering and delivery. The goal of the program to help partner drive more revenue.
“What we are trying to do is make our field understand who is certified and have an active list of partners. Today, it makes sense to go through partners and have our field work hand-and-hand with the channel on deal flow,” Cherian added.
In addition, Red Hat’s active technical alliance program is in place for solution providers to create new architectures for software-defined storage designs that use Red Hat alliance vendor partners.
A future goal for Rangachari and Cherian is to increase channel sales in storage to be north of 60 per cent.
Canadian Partner Winners
At the Red Hat, North American Partner Conference, the Canadian operation and the company channel organization awarded eight prizes to solution providers. Here are the winners:
- Little known Arctiq won two Red Hat Canada 2017 awards: Emerging Solutions Champion Partner of the Year prize and the 2017 Services Partner of the Year award;
- HighVail captured the Red Hat Canada 2017 Growth Partner of the Year award;
- Vancouver’s Unilogik took home the Red Hat Canada 2017 Net New Business Champion Partner of the Year award;
- Opticca was presented with the Red Hat Canada 2017 Middleware Solutions Champion Partner of the Year award;
- Softchoice won the Red Hat Canada 2017 High Volume Partner of the Year award;
- And, Ottawa’s PureLogic IT Solutions Inc. claimed the prize for Red Hat Canada 2017 Ready Level Partner Champion of the Year.
And, Red Hat Canada also honoured one of its vendor alliance partners at the event. Microsoft Canada won Red Hat Canada’s 2017 Collaboration Partner of the Year award.