With a rising share price, and reports of all its biggest deals with customers being renewed, Red Hat is doing well. Its channels in Europe have been part of the success as Petra Heinrich, VP partner & alliances EMEA, is keen to point out.
It looks as if the business has become mainstream, just as it wanted when it revealed the new partner programme 3.0 over a year ago. “I think the overall concept is a right one. Europe is doing really well, not just in terms of growth, but in meeting objectives. It is still hard work, but the customers accept it,” she says.
And Red Hat itself has grown so much in Europe compared to a few years ago, she adds. “The mature countries – UK, France Germany are well set up, with large teams. We have country managers and teams taking care of partner sales and solutions architects – all areas have grown and we are replicating this into our other markets such as Spain, Italy and Benelux. We try to balance the investment to keep them all at the same pace.”
“In addition we are looking into emerging markets, where we have small teams: a focus on CIS and a team in Poland for the EU countries in the east. We have also finally opened out office in Turkey. Small teams, but there to work locally with partners and customers to capture the opportunities in the market, and with different mechanisms in each market.”
It is clear the partner business is going well. During this change period, Red Hat saw the top partners moving ahead strongly, but some others decided not to take part, she says; but overall numbers of partners in Europe are up strongly. “The number of partners in premium and advanced status is going up all the time. The fundamental basis for growth are the solution providers – often medium sized companies with skills and expertise who know how to implement a JBoss technology or solution; they have grown well. We also have made moves in the system integrators' market, where we are developing a relationship, particularly with the European SIs like Atos. This takes time, but supporting the Sis on their standardised operations on opensource is going well.”
“Solution partners are at the heart of what we do – and they get the benefits – training and support and we do a lot of focused things with them. The solutions aspect becomes even more relevant to us going forward.”
This marks a transition in how partners approach the market: no longer just as experts in a particular technology. “In the past they positioned themselves as experts in middleware and offered to answer questions, now we help them to better describe what they do with joint activities. Our German team, for example, have developed one page briefs on the solutions the partners offer.”
“We have finally gone through the partner programme announced in October 2013, and they have had time to catch up on it. The offerings and benefits have gone up, but we have added specialisations – cloud as well as JBoss middleware. And the online training portal has been delivering classes and we have instructor-led training. This changed the requirements, and we delivered the technical requirement into the sales and delivery roles where partners had asked for it.”
Premium subscribers to ITEuropa.com will get the rest of thei interview later this week, including details of the plans for mobile after the FeedHenry acquisition, the new focus on cloud service providers, how relationships have changed with network equipment providers, and why there has been no change in Red Hat distribution in Europe for a long time.
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