Red Hat has transformed its partner program to give more focus and better rewards to its channel; here we talk to the main people involved to see just what it offers 
Petra Heinrich, vice president, partners & alliances, EMEA: “Red Hat’s core principle is the power of community, and partners have always been central to our business. We have built the channel into our approach right from our beginnings as an operating system platform vendor, and have continued to develop our program as we’ve expanded across storage, middleware and cloud to become a multi-product organization. In our biggest update yet, we announced Red Hat EMEA Partner Program 3.0 in October 2013, expressly designed to maximise opportunities for partners. Alongside this we have expanded our channel team by about 40% and reduced the number of accounts per partner manager, to foster deeper and broader relationships. Our channel sales are growing steadily, and today make up a significant 63% of our business as we look to an even brighter future together with our partners.”
With the Partner Program 3.0, Red Hat is addressing changes in the market. Customer needs are becoming more portfolio-oriented – they are looking for interoperable, integrated business solutions as opposed to individual point products that address only one piece of their business objective. To give an example, as businesses move to embrace cloud and adopt IaaS and PaaS, their IT requirements span a broader set of technologies. Partner Program 3.0 encourages the development of multi-product solutions focussed on serving customers’ business needs. Accordingly, it is aligned with Red Hat’s three core specializations: datacentre infrastructure, middleware solutions and cloud infrastructure. Rather than being siloed into product buckets, partners grow into a specialization by demonstrating various skills and have the opportunity to develop across all the specializations, gaining the scope to scale into new areas and lead on emerging technologies.
The Partner Program 3.0 is designed for solution providers, which are rewarded for meeting defined qualification criteria by rising from Red Hat Ready Partner, to Red Hat Advanced Partner and ultimately Red Hat Premier Partner.
More here:
http://www.iteuropa.com/pdfs/RedHat_Partnerprogram.pdf