Red Hat announces updates to its global partner ecosystem

Last year, the technology industry experienced a boom from new possibilities and remarkable advances, from new opportunities in artificial intelligence to changes in the virtualization market, Red Hat teamed up with its partners to meet these demands and pave the way for innovation.To help them stay agile in this dynamic industry, in 2024 the corporation presented the first phase of updates to its partner program, offering a new modular program structure, standardized incentives and enhanced digital tools. 

Anchored in a module of co-creation of products and technologies, new distributor engagement policies and courses focused on the importance of incentives and refunds to stimulate sales, the second phase of updates in the global partner program focuses on bringing more improvements to the partner side and assisting them in their business journeys alongside Red Hat.

Module Co-creation of the partner program

In 2024, Red Hat implemented a modular approach to its partner program, starting with three modules focused on Reseller, Distribution, and Joint Selling, designed to help customers be more accurate in their core business activities. Now, a new module, Co-creation, will be available in the coming weeks to further reward Red Hat technology partners. 

The CoCreation module will be directed to partners who certify or validate their products and develop new solutions with company technologies. The course is particularly relevant for companies that identify themselves as independent software and hardware suppliers (IHVs and ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Interested in training will earn points for activities such as joint solution creation, validation and certification of Red Hat platforms and content development and market launch strategies to bring these solutions to customers. The accumulated points will go to various benefits, including training, sales, marketing and technical support release within the platform.  

Streamlining engagement with distributors

The company is implementing a distribution model to encourage greater engagement between distributors and their focused partners, helping to increase skill development and improve the execution of product launch strategies in the market business-to-businessempowering partners to choose a distributor of their choice, with whom they can develop a long-standing plan. 

Through the incorporation of activities go-to-market within the partner program modules to recognize value-added initiatives such as joint creation of marketing assets, customer demos, proof-of-concept development and more. This allows partners to earn points and rewards and enables progression of opportunities in generating awareness by integrating these activities, Red Hat aims to recognize the performance of partner activities through more holistic forms of relationship in order to achieve higher assertiveness rates. 

These go-to-market activities are included in all modules of the partner program, so regardless of how partners choose to work with Red Hat, they can be recognized and rewarded as they participate in and interact with these content.

Expanding incentives and reimbursements 

From the latest updates to the global partner engagement program experience, Red Hat has been standardizing refunds and incentives for resale and distribution partners to achieve greater visibility and more predictable growth.This is a global implementation to provide companies connected to the company with clear, early insights to maximize profitability, plan sales cycles more effectively, and strengthen competitive positioning.The updated reimbursement and incentive structure complements the contract record incentives previously announced by the organization, which provides greater margin of opportunities for partners to successfully register and develop new business.

Next steps

The transformation of the global partner program represents the company's commitment to promoting an open approach to the alliance ecosystem, either to deliver impactful and personalized solutions to customers or to drive perennial changes in the structure of organizations. At the heart of Red Hat's strategy prevails greater autonomy between the different parties, so that everyone benefits and has clearer growth opportunities.

Throughout 2025, members of this ecosystem will receive additional updates to develop new business flows and stimulate a more holistic and collaborative market view. Meanwhile, news is not enough, partners can find more information about the different program modules, go-to-market launch opportunities, the distributor-aligned model and incentives in the Red Hat Content Center.