RedHat seeks low-hanging fruit in the channel

There's a lot of what salesmen call "low-hanging fruit" in the channel. And this fall RedHat is filling its basket on behalf of open source.

"We're usually the first to come to people with a Linux channel strategy," said Ed Boyajian, director of strategic partnerships for RedHat. The company, which began pushing its operating system toward OEMs like Dell and IBM, is now on to its first "two-tier strategy" through re-sellers like Ingram and TechData.

The idea is that folks calling on vertical markets would get their product through TechData.Their customers in turn would get operating system and middleware support through RedHat, while remaining the first customer call on application support.

It's a traditional channel strategy, going back over 25 years, but "these are early days" for it in open source, said Boyajian.

Still, RedHat has big hopes. Some 60% of the company's revenue now comes from re-sale channels, and Boyajian expects that to go up. "We have specific targets on the number of advanced business partners we want to sign up."

The success of an open source channel strategy, in other words, should be quickly known. And once RedHat shows the way, others are likely to follow. Although they may not all get the low-hanging fruit.

Oh, how about supporting all those new customers? Scaling won't just have to occur in the salesforce, he admitted. The communities around both RedHat and Jboss is outstanding. We've front-ended all that with disciplined support and process handling inquiries and all the rest."