Comms Business spoke with Penny Philpot, vice president, EMEA partner ecosystems at Red Hat, about how the company is improving its latest partner initiatives, the key challenges and opportunities facing the industry, and her outlook for the next 12 months.
1) What partner initiatives is Red Hat currently working on?
We recently transformed our global partner experience to offer greater simplicity, choice and flexibility to partners by introducing the Red Hat Partner Practice Accelerator Program. This updated program strategy will help us engage more simply and transparently with our partners, co-create relevant solutions and accelerate partner business growth. We're providing partners with extensive access to resources and professional services opportunities to enhance their profitability, differentiate themselves in the market and generate customer success using Red Hat technologies.
To support this initiative, we've also been investing in making resources, expertise and open source solutions more accessible to partners to help them operate more seamlessly with customers. We’ve also introduced Red Hat Demo Platform, which offers partners a platform for on-demand product demonstrations, including step-by-step instructions and talking points for customers.
2) What are your channel plans for 2024?
The strategic pillars we are focused on driving over the next 2-3 years include sustainable growth in the cloud to drive intentional go-to-market activities with partners; broadening the depth and breadth of skills with distribution partners to help us further scale out the Channel; and deepening integrated offerings and expanding embedded models. Our overarching goal is to build, connect and catalyse an open ecosystem of partners.
3) How did you get into the industry and what are your career highlights?
I’ve been in the IT industry for more than 30 years, predominantly in the indirect ecosystem partner space. I worked at Oracle for 25 years early in my career, where I began by setting up two tier distribution for the first time in the UK business before moving into a wider EMEA and global ecosystem leadership roles. I then went on to lead Microsoft's ISV business worldwide, and after similar EMEA roles at Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, I took on the role at Red Hat.
Throughout my career, I’ve spent much of my time leading partner ecosystem teams within different regions, both in EMEA and globally. Importantly, I’ve learned that there is no one-size fits all approach when it comes to working with different countries.
At the same time, I have a lot of experience in building different routes to market, working with ISVs, system integrators, hyperscalers and so on. Each partner can do a multitude of different activities. I’m bringing in fresh eyes and using my experience, but not taking that for granted. Red Hat has an exciting journey ahead and I want to continue to learn from and add to it by asking the right questions and adapting what I know.
4) What are the biggest challenges and growth opportunities facing the open source technology industry? How do you see the sector evolving over the next 12 months?
Co-creation will play a fundamental role in the partner ecosystem this year and beyond. It will help our partners and customers capitalise on new technologies such as cloud, automation and AI, while facing constrained budgets, skills gaps and fast evolving market demands. Interoperability and jointly engineered solutions will prove crucial to bridging existing and new technologies.
In the dynamic field of AI, collaboration is key to progress. Sectors like healthcare, manufacturing and finance already rely on AI models to propel them into the new age. This is where the Red Hat ecosystem comes in, working with hardware vendors to get that capacity to enable machine learning, while connecting specialist AI startups with large companies in order to get these solutions to market.
Lastly, the rise of sovereign cloud - specialised cloud providers purpose-built to meet stringent and rapidly evolving country-specific certification requirements - is introducing more choice to customers operating in highly-regulated spaces such as finance, healthcare and public sectors. We will see more dynamic solutions borne out of alignment with sovereign cloud providers, ultimately offering customers the freedom to make informed choices based on their specific requirements.