Red Hat to aggressively recruit partners

After opening a new office in New Zealand, Red Hat says it will aggressively recruit channel partners in New Zealand to address increasing local demand for open source solutions.

Currently Red Hat says it has a 120-strong partner ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand but aims to "significantly increase” this in 2011 and grow its channel business beyond that of its direct-to-market business.

ANZ Managing Director, Max McLaren, said the company will rely on channel partners to manage the demand for its enterprise-ready open source solutions.

"Red Hat’s focus is still very much around infrastructure and bolstering the Unix to Linux migration business, while our middleware business continues to build momentum,” said McLaren. "However, we expect virtualisation and cloud computing will play a more important role in the channel during 2011, and we plan to focus on working with partners to drive their business in this area.”

And here’s the pitch.

"The beauty of being a Red Hat partner is that you’re not just selling a piece of technology, open source is something that our partners believe in and are passionate about because they know it offers significant opportunities – both for the customer and for their own bottom line,” added McLaren.