Through open hybrid cloud, Red Hat delivers a flexible cloud experience that is centred on speed, stability, and scale – all prerequisites for digital transformation
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“Today, there is tremendous opportunity for partners who can identify the hybrid cloud opportunity and build service delivery capability. With the right service capabilities, partners can generate higher profits as well as retain and grow their customer base.”
Ritesh Syal,
Director, Partner Ecosystem,
Red Hat India/SAARC, India
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Massive digitalization, shift to online operations and the huge adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning forced by the pandemic gave the cloud industry a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
Here, in a special interaction with SME Channels, Ritesh Syal: Director, Partner Ecosystem, Red Hat India / SAARC, India, reveals his organization’s strategy for growing the cloud industry, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
The pandemic forced the businesses to put their digital transformation journey in accelerated mode. Today, business priorities are ensuring productive collaboration between distributed workforce, achieving business continuity, and cost optimization. For organisations, it’s about getting the most out of existing resources and using technologies to extend operations to remote or distributed teams. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a scalable, reliable foundation for these efforts while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers extensive automation capabilities, making it easier for IT teams with limited manpower to keep services up and running. IT teams need to effectively bridge existing mission-critical systems and applications with cloud-native services – Red Hat OpenShift provides a standardised plane across all of these footprints, enabling IT teams to retain existing resources while still pushing forward innovation in the cloud. Combined with OpenShift virtualization, virtual machines can now even be brought forward onto cloud-native infrastructure like Kubernetes, breaking down the silos that once existed between developers working on the “here and now” and the future.
As a major cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022?
Enterprises are focusing on adopting technologies like automation, cloud-native development, integration to gain resiliency, robustness and agility for faster adoption. As organisations move more workloads to cloud and adopt digital technologies, they are realising the value of hybrid cloud. Going forward, many innovations will exist at least in part at the edge of global networks. This future at the edge will be powered by data, 5G, Linux containers, automation and Kubernetes supporting all kinds of workloads from AI to IOT. With the evolving application environment, businesses will need hybrid cloud built on open interoperable platforms that gives them flexibility and consistent foundation to design and build applications based on business needs, regardless of application footprint. I would expect in 2022, Open Hybrid Cloud infrastructure will become a key component in all IT strategies.
Please shed some light on your cloud offerings.
Red Hat Cloud Suite is a combination of tightly integrated Red Hat technologies that can be used to build a cloud infrastructure and develop cloud-native apps. Open hybrid cloud is Red Hat’s recommended strategy for delivering a flexible cloud experience that is centred on speed, stability, and scale- the three elements that have become synonymous with digital transformation. With the advent of rapid digital adoption, organisations are looking to develop and operate a mix of applications to cater to their rapidly evolving business needs. Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy is built on the technological foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform that comes in handy with its full-stack automated operations to manage hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge deployments while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is geared towards implementing enterprise-wide automation- across various phases of the automation journey.
What is the USP of your offerings?
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions. Red Hat’s deep commitment to the open source community, our customers and partners success, and open source development model is the key to our success. Our developers actively participate in hundreds of well known open source community projects like Docker container engine, Kubernetes and OpenStack and many many more. We start with community-built open source software that meets the needs, partially or fully, of our customers. Then, upon these projects Red Hat builds, hardening security, patching vulnerabilities, and adding new enterprise features. We then contribute these improvements back to the original project for the benefit of the community as a whole. As customers use our software, they provide feedback, submit bug reports, and request additional features as their needs shift. This input guides Red Hat’s development. Our collaboration with open source communities has helped us bring these innovations to market in products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform and more. By using open source innovation, we help customers drive innovation in their own business. We help customers consume the innovation of open source-developed software. Customers appreciate our willingness to work with them to solve their most difficult challenges
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners? Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
We at Red Hat believe that partnerships are fundamental to ensure our customers’ success. While we have business units that engage with the customers like telcos, banks and public sector enterprises, governments, a large part of our market coverage and continued deployment and migration is led with our partners.
Today, there is tremendous opportunity for partners who can identify the hybrid cloud opportunity and build service delivery capability. With the right service capabilities, partners can generate higher profits as well as retain and grow their customer base. For instance, partners skilled in the concept of kubernetes, containerization, automation and mobility would be able to implement their expertise and foresight in making more informed transitions and fulfil the role of system integrators while providing services to their customers.
At Red Hat, it is our constant endeavour to up-skill our partners and build programs that are designed to enable them and take advantage of the opportunity, helping enterprises and governments in accelerating innovation through more agile IT infrastructure and applications. This can also enable partners to differentiate themselves in a saturated market of IT service providers.
For Instance, our partner program, Red Hat Partner Connect, supports the evolving needs of our partners — so we can share in both collaboration and success. Our program offers a flexible structure designed to accommodate our partners’ individual business models while also providing them access to a variety of benefits that help develop our partners expertise and increase their capability to sell and deliver Red Hat technologies. Our Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is designed to help our partners to better meet customer needs for cloud-based technologies. We are partners with many cloud service providers like NetMagic, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and several others – and we see a very healthy growth with them. Further, our Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program is designed to better position SIs to meet customers’ increasing interest for containerized application development and platforms that can support cloud-native workloads to become more efficient in delivering innovative solutions.
