Red Hat Bets on Innovation in the Channel

IT solution providers tend to focus more on technologies that are just hitting the top of the bell curve in terms of mainstream adoption. But Red Hat is making a case for partners to place more focus on emerging technologies.

Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Application Partner Initiative, through which it works with partners to spur adoption of Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

Getting partners to either develop applications or work closely with third-party developer is a key part of the program. Red Hat will work with partners to build a practice around what it views as core platforms for emerging use cases—which span everything from cloud computing to microservices—including providing sales and marketing resources, said John Bleuer, vice president of global alliances at Red Hat.

“We’re going to energize our product business,” said John Bleuer, vice president, Global Alliances.

Red Hat is especially keen to establish OpenShift as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment that can support both legacy applications and emerging applications that are based on Docker containers being used to create microservices. Docker makes it much simpler to package application code up in a way that can be run on any virtual machine, bare-metal server or PaaS. IT organizations are employing those containers to better isolate application code via a series of smaller microservices that are simpler to update and manage.

Most recently, Red Hat released an update to the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that makes it simpler to also deploy legacy applications using Docker. Longer term, the expectation is that IT organizations will decompose legacy monolithic applications into a series of microservices.

Being at the forefront of that opportunity is critical for solution providers that want to stay relevant to their customers in the months and years ahead, as more IT organizations meld application development and IT operations into a common set of DevOps processes using containers and microservices, said Farhan Hussain, general manager of reselling and training at Levvel.

“We want to stay on the cutting edge as organizations operationalize Docker,” he stated.

Red Hat will initially work with 10 to 15 partners before making the Red Hat Application Partner Initiative more broadly available across its entire channel.

Of course, Red Hat is not the only platform provider focused on emerging technologies that promises to transform how IT gets deployed and managed. But Red Hat is one of the few that is focused on making sure its channel partners get the opportunity to also profit from that transition.