Red Hat announces SMB-focused partner programme overhaul

Red Hat is working towards a more simplified service for go-to-market strategies for its partners.

The open source software firm is gathering its partner network at the 2018 North America Partner Conference this week, where it will share some of the work currently being done to modernize, simplify and help it more closely align with its partners.

"Let me start by saying that working together already "works"," said Red Hat's senior VP of channel sales, Mark Enzweiler. "Red Hat's growth has been fueled by partners, who globally contribute to 75 plus % of our revenue.

"Partners open more doors for open source than Red Hat can do alone. We create better solutions and solve customer challenges more quickly and creatively when we work together. That being said, there's always room for improvement."

The company's intent is to help accelerate time-to-market, whether that is streamlining processes or improving interfaces and or content, it's looking to help its partners and customers tackle digital transformation challenges in ways that make their lives easier and smooth over some programmatic transformation.

As part of that shift, Red Hat announced it is working on a "unified digital experience", a single partner portal that provides a "one stop shop for technical and business resources" for the entire community. It also revealed it's working on extending its footprint into the SMB market, involving new sales campaigns and analytics tools to help support partner-led selling.

Red Hat also said its new go-to-market strategies will help create tools, content and training which partners can use to solve customer's IT challenges.

Over the past year, Red Hat said it made significant changes to its partner platforms that were now generally available. These include an improved learning management system dedicated to partner training and accreditations, an enhanced sales experience, new product certification workflows, new technical zones for architectural guidance, assistance for software development partners, and more marketing, sales and technical resources.

However, Enzweiler stressed that the company was looking to make more changes to the channel and detailed its work still in progress, including a unified digital experience with a single partner portal that will act as a 'one stop shop' for technical and business resources for its partner community.