Practical Technology

On October 10th, Red Hat announced the launch of the Red Hat Partner Center, an online resource offering a centralized place for Red Hat partners to more easily and seamlessly conduct business with Red Hat. Over the last year, Red Hat has been trying to improve its channel partnerships. It started in October 2006, when the Linux giant hired Mark Enzweiler as its vice president of North American channel sales. Since then, the company, based in Raleigh, N.C., has made major strides in its channel programs.

Now, through the global Red Hat Partner Center, partners around the world will have access to product, program, pricing and training information on Red Hat and JBoss solutions and services from a single Web location.

The Partner Center isn’t just for English-speaking system integrators and VARs. The Center is localized in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. From here, Red Hat and JBoss partners of all partner tracks and membership levels can access the information needed to develop new business opportunities, renew existing customers and fully leverage the benefits of the Red Hat Partner Program. Red Hat claims that with this new, easy-to-use resource, partners will be given further opportunities to increase revenue and profits, align technologies with Red Hat in order to meet customers’ needs and enjoy a simplified Red Hat partner experience.

“We worked closely with our Business Partners from around the world during the development of the Red Hat Partner Center. Our partners made it clear that they wanted a central partner repository, an easy and seamless way to work with Red Hat, language localization, a single global agreement and access to information to help develop new business and manage existing business,” said Enzweiler. “As we continue to bring in new partners each quarter and specifically expand our JBoss partnerships, the Partner Center will ensure that all partners have a simple, useful resource where there is access to relevant communications and streamlined processes.”

“Red Hat moves much closer to its partners with the new Partner Center online library. Local language is a key success factor within EMEA in order to be close to partners and have successful partnership development,” said Thomas Kucher, director of new business at Magirus International GmbH, a major international IT player, in a statement. Margirus, which has a U.S. presence via Agilysys, works primarily in Europe and the Middle East.

“The Partner Center is clearly arranged with the ability to find relevant sections with a glance. It is a great support to daily work and will also help Magirus, who is strongly committed to Red Hat, with additional services to ease the entry into Red Hat’s open source offerings.”

“In the past seven years, we have seen Red Hat commit to and invest in the success of the channel, especially in government,” said Christine Schaefer, director of marketing at DLT Solutions, Red Hat’s largest U.S. government reseller. “The new Red Hat Partner Center is just another example of that commitment and rivals some of the best partner portals we have seen in the industry.”

A version of this story was first published on Channel Insider.