Red Hat’s New Strategies For Enterprise And SMB

Red Hat has devised a two pronged channel strategy to address customers in the enterprise and the SMB segments in India. The strategy is essentially a part of Red Hat’s plans for RHEL 6 that was released last month.

To target the large enterprise, the vendor is expanding partnerships with its advanced business partners (ABPs).

“We are increasing the number of ABPs and Red Hat channel managers. They will develop joint business plans and demand generation activities. We want to grow channel managers by 50 percent and the number of ABPs from current 10 to 25 by end 2011,” said Josep Garcia, Director, Channel Sales and Inside Sales, Asia Pacific and Japan. “We used to have a dollar figure that has been moved away. What we prefer now is how the strategies work with the customers; how they (the channel manager and the ABPs) look at synergies, expand footprint and business plans.”

Red Hat is looking at geographic expansion with the help of its tier-2 partners to capture the SMB market. “We want to now move into tier-2 and tier-3 cities such as Hyderabad and Pune. But now we are looking at solution providers who can do successful migrations from Unix, and hence additional skill sets. Our distributors will recruit the partners.”

Besides, Red Hat is developing a separate channel for its middleware, virtualization and platforms (Red Hat Enterprise Linux (the Operating System).

“While we have a lot of RHEL partners, we are developing partners for middleware and virtualization. For these two specializations, partners would be required to train two sales and two technical persons each. We will enable easy migration of Unix and Windows to Linux, and also offer a lot of online training. Product demos, PoCs, tech features of a product will be offered as a part of the online training course,” informed Garcia. “Once partners clear this exam, they can enroll for physical training programs. These include articulating value proposition, product positioning, discussion of case studies, etc. We will be conducting more training sessions for sales and distribution partners in tier one and tier two cities.”

“We are banking big on RHEL 6. That will propel us to our $1 billion mark. RHEL 6 enables customers to easily migrate from Unix and Windows to Linux. Our target is the HP UX and Solaris customers. We are also looking at acquiring some mindshare from Windows,” he said.

“As enterprises are looking at the cloud, the need for servers is also rising. Large cloud providers such as Amazon, IBM, Google, Salesforce are on our OSes. Even enterprises are looking at alternatives to VMware for virtualization, essentially because our cost is 50 percent or more, lesser than VMware. We charge for subscription as against VMware that charges for licenses. Technology wise, our KVM is integrated with Linux Kernel, where as VMware still needs a Kernel,” said Garcia.

Quoting IDC figures, he said 25-30 percent of the servers deployments are on Linux, hence the balance 70 percent is Red Hat’s addressable market. “Our mindshare is growing. We are getting access to senior IT managers now. Globally, the market share of Red Hat in Linux operating system is around 60 pc. It is the maximum in Japan at 80 percent. SMBs would be our next frontier,” Garcia said.

He added that Red Hat has been successful with the government, telecom and financial services industries in India, and now wants to look at the manufacturing, oil & gas, retail and healthcare verticals.