Channel Chief
“We expect Rev to be a game-changer”
 On his recent visit to India, Mark Enzweiler, Vice President, Global Channel Sales, Red Hat, spoke to Tabrez Khan about the growing acceptance of Linux, its partner programs, and its recently-launched hypervisor
The acceptance of Linux has grown in recent times, but have you been able to make inroads into the mission-critical business applications space?
We see a lot of interest among enterprises in running their mission-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A number of customers have implemented their core applications on the Red Hat Linux platform. For instance, Euronet has adopted Linux to run its global card management system, and recently, the Lahore Stock Exchange migrated its entire trading platform to Red Hat.
Has the customer perception about Linux changed? Earlier, it was seen as a mere cost-saving tool.
Most of our recent deployments in the enterprise space have been driven by the robustness, reliability, security and scalability aspects of the Red Hat Linux platform. No wonder we have lately seen quite a few migrations from proprietary Unix platforms to ours. New India Assurance and Sheila Foams, which recently migrated, would vouch for the performance of the Linux offering.
We have consciously avoided talking about cost-savings because we want enterprises to realize that Red Hat can equal or better the performance of any other platform in the industry. Having said that, our customers have also realized massive cost savings through Red Hat products.
Some of our customers have been able to save up to 90 percent in annual maintenance costs by migrating to Red Hat. For example, Sheila Foams had an annual maintenance contract of Rs 45 lakh for running their ERP system on the Unix platform. This came down to Rs 4 lakh after the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Is the lack of certified Linux applications limiting your growth in the mid-market?
Most applications used by SMBs were earlier certified to run on Windows, so the adoption rate for us in that segment was initially slow. However, that scenario has changed, and we currently have enough certified applications which are targeted at SMBs. Globally, there are 6,000 applications today which have been certified by Red Hat. Even more are self-certified to run optimally on our enterprise OS platform.
Partners seem wary of committing to Red Hat because it’s still not a widely-used platform and there’s a shortage of certified manpower.
That is not true. We have the largest pool of Red Hat Certified Software Engineers (RHCSEs) in India. With close to 25,000 RHCSEs in India and 45,000 globally, availability of trained manpower and skill sets is no longer an issue. Also, partner involvement for us is steadily increasing. If you look at some of our recent deployment projects in India, they have all been partner-driven. Whether it is Keen and Able Computers in the case of Sheila Foams, or Taashee Linux Services in pharma-major Bilcare’s case, they are all tier-2 partners.
So what kind of channel structure do you have here? What’s your channel philosophy?
We have evolved from being a direct-centric company three years ago to a channel-centric company today. About 60 percent of our global business is routed through channels; in Asia it’s almost 80 percent.
Our distributors, Ingram Micro, Integra Solutions and GT Enterprises, will play a key role in ramping up our channel. We have 40 managed partners and 300 distributor-managed partners, of whom 50 work very closely with us. We are currently in the process of expanding our channel to tier-2 cities in India.
However, it’s equally important for us to rationalize our partner strategy to get the right partners to sell the right products. A partner with a long heritage with us may not necessarily be the right one to sell a new concept like virtualization. We are therefore realigning our distribution strategy to categorize partners in accordance with their specialization in one of our three product categories—Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rev virtualization portfolio, and JBoss middleware solutions.
We are also putting in place an advanced partner program, Premier Business Partner, in addition to the existing Ready Partners and Advanced Business Partners. The new level offers VARs expanded sales training, lead distribution, demand-generation campaigns, market development funds and technical support.
Our agenda this year is to work closely with distributors to achieve coverage. We want our distributors to increasingly take on a bigger role in recruiting and enabling partners; in essence, to do many of the things that our channel managers are presently doing.
Are you seeing growing interest in open source virtualization from enterprises?
We are looking to boost our partner engagement with the recently-launched hypervisor, Rev, based on the kernel-based virtual machine technology. We expect Rev to be a game-changer. It will further deepen our offerings in the core IT infrastructure segment.
We did have virtualization products earlier, but with Rev, significant challenges to virtualization such as advanced manageability and inter-operability will be resolved.
In the short period since the launch of Rev in India we have managed some strong reference deployments. For instance, at both Bilcare and Euronet, the entire physical infrastructure is running on the Windows platform, but they have adopted the Rev platform for virtualization.
We will soon be announcing a virtual partner acceleration program globally, whereby we are going to pick a subset of partners and help them chart their virtualization course.
In addition, we will invest heavily and position ourselves aggressively in the market to broaden our base of virtualization customers. |