Red Hat Hires Ex-SUSE Sales Exec to Run EMEA Channels

Published: January 23, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux distributor Red Hat said last week that is has brought on Petra Heinrich to be its new director of channels an partners in its Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

Heinrich was in charge of the formerly independent German Linux distributor and global wannabe SUSE Linux's worldwide indirect sales channel. In the wake of SUSE's acquisition by Novell in late 2003, Heinrich was put in charge of integrating the indirect sales channels of SUSE with those of Novell in the European geography. Of course, Novell's European operations did not perform well, and she eventually left the company to work for SUSE groupware partner Open-Exchange, which now supports both Red Hat and SUSE with its open source groupware. (OpenExchange was the groupware that was turned into SUSE Linux Open Xchange Server, or SLOX, with the SUSE 8.0 generation of Linux, which immediately preceded the Novell acquisition.) Heinrich began her IT and management career at the formerly independent Lotus Development Corp, which was, of course, acquired by IBM in 1995.

With Red Hat still working its way through the JBoss acquisition and JBoss being more of a direct sale historically than Red Hat Enterprise Linux was, Red Hat needs to bolster its channel expertise to build out the channel for both RHEL and JBoss products in Europe. Heinrich will be based in Red Hat's European headquarters in Munich, Germany, and will report to Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's EMEA operations.

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