Red Hat happy to stay in its lane, but excited about partner opportunities

This week’s Red Hat Summit 2023 focused on a lot of things the company is doing to make life better and/or easier for developers, IT professionals and enterprise organizations as a whole. 

But, the value of others being involved is not lost on the company’s CEO Matt Hicks, as ITPro discovered during a press Q&A session. 

“It’s about knowing your swim lane, knowing your lane and where you add value. Where do we really provide value at distribution etc.? There is a lot of cool stuff in IoT [for example], but it’s not [necessarily all ] enterprise use cases or commercially viable,” Hicks said. 

While the company acknowledged potential in a number of areas, it has also been keep to put emphasis where it is needed rather than jumping on all bandwagons for the sake of it. 

Importantly, and in the spirit of open source and the community element, Hicks - and the accompanying keynotes - shouted loud and clear about how much of a team effort things should and needed to be. 

“We are a platform company. Being a platform company means you’re not the total solution. You are combined with an application. There are other pieces. You are not the end thing,” Hicks stressed. 

“You’re always working with someone else. In some cases, it could be a customer building their own application, but in the vast majority of cases it is ISVs and SIs [involved]. And there is an entire ecosystem that innovatives around that.”

Red Hat has many different partners of different sizes, in many industries and there was definitely fair representation at the Summit itself in terms of airtime. 

However, some of the biggest partnerships perhaps gained more attention due to the focus organizations have on these technologies, right now. Microsoft being a case in point. 

Microsoft and Red Hat have partnered to deliver on the business and IT requirements of Yes Bank in India, for example. 

The bank is working with both forms to deploy Azure Red Hat OpenShift to revitalize mobile operations and boost customer experience and satisfaction among other things. 

“In today’s digitally-driven world, agility is paramount. With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, we can promptly respond to customer demands while also having the assurance that our platform is constructed on cutting-edge cloud and cloud-native infrastructure,” said Mahesh Ramamoothy, CIO, YES BANK.

“This provides us with a security-focused, robust, and scalable foundation that we require to lead the charge of digital-native banking in India.”

The YES BANK partnership is a long-standing one that has evolved over the years. 

Jeremy Winter, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Azure Cloud Native and Hybrid, added: “It’s fantastic to see the customer collaboration we have done and the value we have brought over the last four years. It’s exciting to see these joint solutions we’ve been working on gain momentum. 

“Our long standing track record as being there as a partner for our enterprise customers really is the foundation of this [overall] eight-plus year collaboration.” 

Hicks also talked about the multitude of partnership opportunities on the table and how it would be easy to go after everything, everywhere all at once. 

“Sometimes, for me, it’s hard to hold that discipline. We have to understand that we are not the end solution,” he said. “And you have to be strong with who you are partnering with… Whether it’s customers directly or in a really complicated route or chain in automotive etc.”