Red Hat Builds Out Channels, Hires Prez for Asia/Pacific Unit

Published: February 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Red Hat last week launched a new channel program in North America called the Red Hat Certified Service Provider program. Under the program, which will be rolled out worldwide eventually, Red Hat's Professional Services organization is reaching out to other service providers and consultancies to get them certified to do some of the consulting and integration work that Red Hat itself would normally do.

The idea is to get various IT players to learn Red Hat's software, implementation methodologies, and best practices, and then allow these organizations to act as a subcontractor for Red Hat's Professional Services group. Red Hat will expose services organizations to new customers and revenue opportunities, and presumably such companies will share opportunities for software sales with Red Hat as well. (The old one-hand-washing-the-other deal.)

Red Hat has over 500 channel partners already, who account for more than half of its revenues each quarter but who are mostly OEM partners selling software licenses and support contracts. By moving into the services arena with partners, Red Hat hopes to expand its own lucrative consulting, design, and integration services business--and that of its partners, too.

Also last week, Red Hat announced that it has named a president of its Asia/Pacific operations, a newly created position at the company. Red Hat has picked Gery Messer, an IT marketing and management consulting expert, to fill that position. He will have dual reports into Charlie Peters, Red Hat's chief financial officer, and Alex Pinchev, executive vice president of global sales.

Messer comes to Red Hat from EMC, the place where the company also got another executive, Nicholas Van Wyk, to take over its vice president of operations position. Messer was vice president of EMC's Asia/Pacific unit, and joined the company in 2003 to head up its Technology Solutions Group in Asia and Japan. Messer ran ERP software maker SAP's operations in Korea, then joined Deloitte Consulting in 1996 as managing director of its Southeast Asia operations. In this job, he ran the technology practice across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

The Asia/Pacific president position does not include Japan, by the way. Yuji Fujita holds that position, and as part of Red Hat's expanding channel strategy, the company last week hired Masatsugu Koketsu, formerly a partner at Accenture Japan, to be its marketing and channel director in the Japanese market. The move follows a similar appointment of Petra Heinrich, formerly from Linux distributor SUSE (when it was independent) as director of channels in its EMEA operations.

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