21 to 1: How Red Hat amplifies partner revenue

At Red Hat Summit, we announced new research from IDC looking at the contributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to the global economy. The study, sponsored by Red Hat, found that the workloads running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are expected to “touch” more than $10 trillion worth of global business revenues in 2019 - powering roughly 5% of the worldwide economy. While that statistic alone is eye popping, these numbers, according to the report, are only expected to grow in the coming years, fueled by more organizations embracing hybrid cloud infrastructures. As a result, there is immense opportunity for Red Hat partners and potential partners to capitalize on the growth and power of RHEL. 

Building the hybrid cloud
Organizations are investing in new technologies and practices with the goal of transforming their infrastructure and delivering more value to customers. As we’ve seen, hybrid cloud has become a default infrastructure for digital transformation - providing a mix of public, private and on-premises infrastructure to support the specific needs of individual workloads. And as more organizations move to adopt a hybrid cloud infrastructure, a consistent, more secure foundation for building applications across environments is more important than ever before.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system designed for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds. It was built to not just support enterprise IT in the hybrid cloud, but to help new technology strategies based around DevOps, containers and AI thrive. And RHEL is backed by the IT industry’s largest commercial open source software ecosystem, comprised of certified third-party software, hardware, and cloud providers. 

Power of the ecosystem
Red Hat wouldn’t be Red Hat without our expansive partner ecosystem. Currently, more than 70% of Red Hat’s revenue comes from our partner ecosystem. Our certification offerings have supported the adoption of innovative technologies from Linux to OpenStack to containers, creating the largest, commercially supportable open source ecosystem for these hybrid cloud technologies. Red Hat has thousands of applications certified for use with RHEL, more than a hundred partner solutions integrating with Red Hat OpenStack Platform and more than 100 vendors with Red Hat certified container applications. And more than 1,000 Red Hat CCSPs offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their cloud infrastructures, serving as a foundation for organizations to adopt cloud-native strategies.

RHEL is not just a technology platform; according to IDC’s research, it’s also a revenue driver for today and tomorrow. That’s to say, as hybrid cloud grows in adoption, RHEL is likely to as well - and the ecosystem will continue to prosper. The results IDC found for Red Hat partners speak for themselves, with the RHEL ecosystem expected to make more than $82 billion in revenue this year. Additionally, for every dollar of revenue made by Red Hat in 2019, IDC estimates that the ecosystem will make $21.74. That means the ecosystem's revenue today is almost 22 times that of Red Hat’s alone.

The ecosystem surrounding RHEL is quite an engine. By the end of 2019, it is expected to directly employ nearly 900,000 workers, with an additional 236,000 jobs predicted to be added through 2023. And since many of the companies included in the RHEL ecosystem are locally based organizations, the revenue will help serve their direct regions. According to IDC, investments in marketing, local offices, staff, and services should hit more than $47 billion this year, providing a positive long-term economic impact on local economies.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux into the future
And that is just the beginning. Based on IDC’s calculations, the ecosystem is predicted to grow an estimated 11% a year from 2019 to 2023. Ecosystem revenue is estimated to grow to $119 billion in 2023 and local investment will grow to $69 million. We’re working to not only create and support an operating system that is the foundation for modern IT, but simultaneously create jobs and open up millions of dollars in opportunity for the partners we work with.

It’s been incredible to see the impact RHEL has had globally and we’re excited to see what the future holds. Red Hat’s extensive partner ecosystem is filled with the solutions and expertise needed for businesses to fully build out their hybrid cloud strategies, with every application and hardware configuration tested and certified to work effectively on RHEL. We want to work with you to help bring the next generation of IT to organizations around the globe.

Curious about how RHEL impact customers, IT professionals and more? Stay tuned as we’ll be exploring those topics in upcoming posts on the economic impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.