Red Hat is increasingly working with specialist ISVs, supporting marketing and expansion into foreign markets. It plans a push on ISV education and support in EMEA next year.
The Avaloq Banking Suite, for example, will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Starting with Avaloq Banking Suite 3.7 and available this month, Avaloq’s customer network, including tier one banking institutions in global financial centres, will now be able to integrate their core banking systems with the Red Hat enterprise Linux platform. Previously, the Avaloq Banking Suite primarily ran on proprietary UNIX. Red Hat has also named the banking solution specialist as an Advanced ISV Partner. This also highlights that the strong Red hat markets remain telcos, banking and financial and healthcare.
“Avaloq is a good example of how Red Hat is working with ISVs, getting traction with companies who can see our support and marketing,” says Simon Williams, ISV EMEA boss at Red Hat. This growth is happening across Europe, he says – even in the southern European areas. “France and Spain are getting dedicated resource and we are particularly active with companies such as the global telco ISVs who have a presence in most countries.”
Then there are growth areas such as Israel which are hotbeds of technology and have many emerging ISVS, and others such as Poland and the eastern European market . “Southern Europe has been slow as expected, but there are some deal going through particularly in medical ISVs. I have been doing lots of meetings in eastern Europe in the last two weeks, putting further resources into the region where there is a strong interest and traction. The traditional markets are doing well – UK and Nordics, Baltic.”
Where Red Hat can play a part internationally is in advising north American ISVs on how to be introduced into Europe: “We help with language issues and introduce them to our ecosystem. What is key for them is the speed and time to market. EMEA has over 3000 ISVs now in multiple markets. The telco has traditionally been out strong and we can help global ISVs in reaching the European telcos.”
There is also the relationship with the OEM ISVs – Intel, NetApps etc. where the relationship is based on technology; at the other end of the scale are the smaller niche players who are often very small and in specific application areas. But ISVs are tending to be larger organisations now, he says – and they are getting certified so they approach customers with recognised credentials, really getting in to the programmes with dedicated focus.
“Obviously is it a matter of maturity of markets so financial is established; and anyone in the telco ISV market knows just how fast things can scale and they need to operate on a global level. And we are seeing fewer of the large client organisation interested in spinning off their IT developers as independent ISV operations, although we do have some formed this way.”
“Customers are interested in OpenStack (the open platform supported by Red Hat, Dell, HP, IBM and Cisco, among others) and what it offers, they perhaps remember lock in and have questions about standards and openness. .And off course cloud is having an impact on marketplace where customers have many questions and so the best ISVs have to be in a position to answer wider issues on technology and future developments – Red Hat can obviously help here. It sees its role as informing and educating ISVs and through them the customers, and we have a lot of work planned for next year on this,” he concludes.