The APAC partner ecosystem is stronger together

2018 has been another great year for Red Hat and our APAC partners, and I want to thank everyone for their outstanding contributions and commitment to supporting the Red Hat business. I am also very delighted by the positive feedback we received from many regional partners on our strategy presented at the 2018 Red Hat Partner Conference Asia Pacific, which took place in Bali this year. Particularly worth mentioning is the support from some of our local partners such as NTT Data and Fujitsu in Japan, and Deloitte in Australia for sharing our joint achievements at our partner conference.

At Red Hat, we’ve always believed that we can accomplish much more – such as helping customers innovate faster – by working with our local partners, including systems integrators, OEMs, ISVs and solution providers, instead of doing it alone. In APAC, we have proven with customers like Cathay Pacific that our technology helps shift IT budget from maintaining the current infrastructure to innovation. In the region, our partners recognize that products like Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation make this possible and we are helping them build skills and solutions in these areas.

Our collaboration with global and regional CCSP partners has expanded, pay as you go subscriptions with these partners has played a key role in our business in APAC. CCSPs such as Deloitte, Fujitsu and STT Connect in Singapore, have taken a step further by rebuilding their infrastructure using technologies like Red Hat OpenStack and Red Hat Ceph Storage to enhance their cloud offerings that pair open innovation and agility with the stability, availability and enhanced security required by enterprises.

Committed to helping partners succeed

As part of our commitment to our partners, we launched the OpenShift Practice Builder Program in APAC earlier this year to help system integrators (SIs) build and monetize a modern cloud-native application development and delivery practice using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware.  We already have a dozen SIs in the region enrolled in the program in just a few months, and we expect more to come onboard next year.

In 2019, we will continue to support to our partners. For instance, we plan to upskill our partners and build programs that designed to enable them to take advantage of the opportunity to help enterprises and governments in APAC accelerate innovation through more agile IT infrastructure and applications. This also can enable partners to differentiate themselves in a saturated market of IT service providers.

At Red Hat, we envision that open unlocks the world’s potential to solve complex problems, improve the business or even enhance our lives. However, given the grand scale of the vision, it takes a partner ecosystem in every region to realize it. That is why we continue to invest in our partners in APAC and strengthen their capabilities because when we work together, we excel.

Josep Garcia is vice president of Channel Partners & Alliances for Red Hat Asia Pacific.