Celebrating the global partner ecosystem with Stefanie Chiras

Last week, Stefanie Chiras, Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, was honored as the 2023 CRN Woman of the Year Award winner in the vendor and distributor category.

Chiras’s win in the inaugural CRN Women of the Year Awards celebrates her remarkable commitment to driving positive change, leadership and channel success within the tech landscape through establishing and delivering a worldwide ecosystem strategy to support Red Hat's scale as a global entity. Over the past year, Chiras has guided the global ecosystem team to introduce new rules of engagement, bolster partner co-creation efforts and extend critical partnerships to support customers on their cloud migration journeys. 

The CRN Women of the Year Awards are a testament to the influence of women in the channel, and the companies and allies who support them in driving meaningful change in the tech sector. The awards recognize not only individual achievements but also the collective efforts of organizations dedicated to advancing diversity and driving progress.

Chiras (right) accepted the award from CRN’s Jennifer Follett (left) at the 2023 Women of the Year Awards Gala event.

In honor of this recognition, read on for a brief Q&A with Stefanie Chiras to learn more about the ecosystem’s achievements this past year and what Red Hat partners can expect in the new year.

How does it feel to be recognized as an inaugural CRN Woman of the Year?

It was an incredible surprise to hear my name called while surrounded by a community of equally deserving and accomplished women. I am continuously grateful to work in a field that is rooted in community – from my early days working with Linux and open source code, to collaborating with Red Hat’s vast ecosystem of partners, and finally, joining this impressive fellowship of Women in the Channel. 

One of the most rewarding aspects of my role in Red Hat’s partner ecosystem is bringing forward this spirit of inclusivity and shared experiences in our collaborations with partners. We all have special talents and valuable knowledge that can contribute to making a real difference in the world. When we are able to unite as a community, the possibilities are endless.

I have the honor of being the executive sponsor for the Red Hat Women’s Leadership Community, where we aim to make a difference by providing a forum for Red Hat associates to exchange ideas and experiences, network and engage in educational and mentorship opportunities. We work to support the overall equity and inclusion efforts at Red Hat and establish an inclusive environment that helps associates deliver their maximum impact.

If you had to choose one word to summarize 2023 for the partner ecosystem, what would it be? 

Opportunity. This year was all about identifying and seizing the opportunity to innovate side by side with partners to deliver value into the hands of customers. We have experienced a shift in perspective, wherein Red Hat and our partners view every challenge as an opportunity to improve, grow and collaborate.

For example, we took the opportunity to establish streamlined paths of cross-collaboration and are making the outputs of those collaborations more easily accessible to customers through our expanded Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. It showcases available co-created partner solutions to help customers and other partners quickly find and implement tailored offerings. Similarly, an opportunity for many customers, and in turn partners, this past year has been making the transition from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This presents a critical opportunity for organizations to establish a standardized, reliable and scalable operating system that can carry them into the future. To help them along the way, we worked with cloud providers to make migration tool kits available in the leading cloud marketplaces and engaged with companies like Salesforce to provide hands-on support – seizing the opportunity for future innovation.

If we take a macro view of the industry landscape, the current challenge and undeniable opportunity for all of us right now lies in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), automation and edge. As the hybrid cloud landscape continues to evolve, these technologies will be critical to enabling workloads across increasingly diverse, distributed and complex IT environments. And of course, we can only help customers seize these opportunities if we come together with partners. I am thrilled to see where this new age of technology leads us with partners, whether it’s finding new ways to engage, new collaborations to unlock or new corners of innovation yet to be explored. We have nothing but endless opportunities ahead of us.

What are you most looking forward to with partners in 2024?

My favorite aspect of my work is connecting with partners. Every day I look forward to engaging directly with our ecosystem to build new capabilities and deliver that value to customers. Red Hat has been working on revitalizing the framework of our global partner engagement model to provide an improved partner experience that aligns more with changing business needs and customer demand, building on our established hybrid cloud strategy. In 2024, I’m looking forward to bringing increased simplicity and transparency to the amazing partners we collaborate with, making it easier for partners to engage in different capacities with Red Hat that better align with their business goals and customer needs.

Together with partners, we will continue to help customers on whatever journey they choose and meet them where they are with the capabilities and partners they need to succeed. For example, maximizing the value that the cloud delivers. I think we can all agree that cloud is here to stay, but there’s still work to be done. Bridging capabilities from the datacenter to the cloud and out to the edge requires constant evaluation, collaboration and adjustments depending on a customer’s unique business needs and IT footprint. This cannot happen in a vacuum. We need each other in order to remain vigilant and forward-thinking.