Red Hat is preparing to announce several virtualization and cloud initiatives at the Red Hat Summit, scheduled for June 22-25 in Boston. The VAR Guy poked around and learned about some Red Hat channel partner efforts scheduled for June 21-22. Here are some preliminary details from Red Hat Global Channel Chief Mark Enzweiler.
Red Hat started to generate some Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) buzz in late 2009, but Enzweiler concedes it’s time to pump up the volume. In fact, Red Hat will promote some sort of RHEV acceleration program to partners at the summit, Enzweiler hints. “We didn’t put our full effort behind RHEV in Q4,” says Enzweiler. “You’ll hear far more at the summit.”
Heading up to the summit, Enzweiler says, Red Hat has been busy re-qualifying its partner base in order to ensure high end-customer satisfaction. Also, Red Hat has been pushing partners to specialize in middleware, virtualization and Linux. Says Enzweiler: “We’ll invest in partners that specialize.”
Also of note: Red Hat has formed a business unit focused on the cloud. The goal is to help customers and partners build bridges and strategies from virtualization to private clouds to public clouds, notes Enzweiler. As part of that effort, Red Hat launched a cloud certification program in mid-2009 that includes Amazon.com. Plus, Symbian recently disclosed plans to build its cloud atop Red Hat’s software.
Money Matters
So, how is Red Hat performing overall? Enzweiler couldn’t provide deep financial details because Red Hat is publicly held and closes its current quarter within days. But generally speaking, it sounds like Red Hat’s strategy to build multiple revenue streams — Linux, virtualization and middleware — is catching on with more and more partners.
Plus, it’s safe to expect Red Hat to have a prominent spot in The VAR Guy’s second annual Open Source 50 report, which tracks the open source IT channel (the report debuts within hours…).
Meanwhile, the broader Linux market may experience dramatic changes. Canonical continues to expand its management team to promote Ubuntu; Novell will announce financial results today amid potential plans to sell the company; and Mandriva is listening to offers from potential investors.
Red Hat doesn’t suffer from such distractions. Instead, watch for virtualization and cloud moves involving partners at the Red Hat Summit.
Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Tags: RHEV
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
Don't miss Charlene O'Hanlon's weekly columns...
Clouds are great, but the F500 is going to beat the drum on security. And this entire wave is going to take years to play out.
I think that the initial penetration rate of clouds into the F500 will be low, because the cloud challenges the CIOs to actually think — Clouds also threaten to eliminate vast swaths of the IT staff — And IT mid-level managers are pretty good at survival, so after security it will be another issue, then another….
I think that Red Hat lacks the F500 street credentials on the C-level to push adoption. So, IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle et al will have to sell the CEOs on the ideas over the next couple of years.
An example of lagging penetration was VMWare — The ROI was just blindingly clear and it still took a while to get wallet-share.
Sam: The VAR Guy respectfully disagrees with you in one area… Red Hat already has mind share among CIOs, many of whom rank Red Hat as the software company that delivers the best ROI (source: Annual Baseline Magazine Survey). Still, Red Hat is relatively small compared to the folks you mentioned — IBM, HP, SAP, Oracle and The VAR Guy agrees it’s going to take some time for Red Hat to accelerate its cloud and virtualization momentum…
-TVG
When I say C-level, I mean everyone but the CIO.
The CIO has a budget, true, but as you know a large percentage of that budget is already inexplicable to the people who control that budget and want to cut it.
Until someone with real credibility, namely sales people from other F500 peers (safe haven vendors), can explain how their offering reduces that core cost in the next three or four quarters, it just won’t happen. That’s why adoption will be slow; it isn’t lack of will, it is the lack of CIO credibility.
You and I come from different perspectives, and I enjoy our exchanges. I think I’m really just tossing out a dimension you could add to your reporting and (very good) analysis here — CIOs are overhead. Nobody believes the IT-as-strategic-advantage pitch any longer, and they’re not buying for one second anything the CIO says, or the IT-related media pundits push. Cost reduction is the order of the day, and justifying it is so easy.
Allow me to provide one example. Why is outsourcing such a major trend, and how is that justified on the C-level cocktail party circuit?
CEO/VP near quotes —
1. We cut our direct IT cost to x% of G&A (or sales, pick your Gartner-fueled benchmark)
2. We eliminated y% of our IT-related workforce across all functions (even the user-champs in the business units)
3. Our support call volume is actually down (as reported by India/IBM)
4. Our productivity is up
This is a breeze in the face, to borrow the phrase from an old HBR article, because here is what’s really happening:
1. Support call volume is down because India is never actually helping
2. Employees gave up making requests for IT-related improvements because they think that management does not care
3. Many of the employees who could translate a business request into an IT project were fired
4. The CIO isn’t making any sense; what’s a Red Hat? Why does that person keep presenting nonsense to me?
So, what’s next? “Let’s do cloud computing when we can find a safe-haven vendor who can help save another z% of IT costs. Why not? It won’t impact the business.”
(sip cocktail, repeat, discuss why income taxes are too high, repeat)
You see the conferences and PR; I see the stellar (sic) non-CIO mind gears spinning at high speed.
After all, why do CIOs have a half-life? Eventually, they say something incomprehensible to justify spending money instead of saving it.
And it really doesn’t matter if the C-level is wrong; they’re in control, and they want that next bonus check at any cost to someone else.
You remind me of me before I learned how the F500 really works (or not).
;}
….btw, the two vendors best-positioned to do this are SAP and IBM, IMO, because they have the shine and sales connections required to actually implement it. As you noted in another post, SAP also has so many partners that their sales team can find you help.
Microsoft is almost universally denied the potential due to their amazing license fee grab a few years ago — That will fuel Open Office once execs (ex CIOs) realize what an Open Office is — cheap.
Apple? My kids love the stuff. I like iTunes. That’s an entertainment company like Disney, isn’t it?
Google — Don’t they make phones now? Didn’t they get hacked by China? What are they, again?
Red Hat — that’s a club my grandmother belonged to, isn’t it?
Oracle – We pay them too much now, and why all the staff to support it again?
…..and so on.
;}