By Tabrez Khan
Red Hat is planning to increase its focus on mid-tier cities in India, which it considers to be a potentially high growth market. The open source software vendor will consider recruiting new partners in these cities, while pushing for increased business through existing ones.
The company is currently conducting roadshows across mid-tier cities such as Lucknow, Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi, Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruchirapalli, Mysore and Goa to encourage customer interest in its products. Red Hat has three key product lines: platforms or operating systems, middleware and virtualization.
“Our initial aim was to consolidate our operations in India, which we have done quite successfully. We started out with large scientific institutions, penetrated large enterprise and now customer comfort level with our products has increased dramatically. Tapping the mid-tier segment seems the logical next step to sustain our growth,” said Josep Garcia, Director, Channel Sales, Asia-Pacific, Red Hat.
“Smaller and mid-tier organizations are looking for sturdy solutions for their business. These kind of customers always existed in mid-tier cities and therefore there was a latent demand. We had not tapped it earlier, so now our focus is to leverage these opportunities with the help of existing and new partners,” added Jaideep Kumar, Head, Channels and Distribution, Red Hat India.
According to Garcia, opportunities for channel partners exist in all three of its product lines including server operating systems and virtualization. Organizations are increasingly looking at virtualization for cost saving and flexibility. “Virtualization is a relatively new area. According to an IDC survey, 80 percent of the companies in India have not adopted virtualization in any form yet. So there is a lot of potentially untapped virtualization products market out there. However, it will slowly catch up, rather than suddenly.”
Garcia claimed that as per the IDC survey 55 percent of the Indian respondents had shown their preference for implementing a Red Hat virtualization solution over other vendors. In order to leverage these opportunities, Red hat was taking a number of partner enablement initiatives.
“We have opened up the Red Hat Sales University to partners, to provide them online sales and technical certification programs. Besides, we are organizing technical and sales boot camps on virtualization for a more interactive training. We have also substantially increased our investment in market development fund, lead generation campaigns, events and other enablement initiatives in India,” said Garcia.
Garcia said Red Hat was on the verge of finalizing its Premier Business Partner Program, which would provide dedicated resources for sales and marketing support to select partners. The partner program will be launched by March or April 2010. |