In the open source community, both Synnex and Tech Data have been positioning themselves as the distributor of choice. And for vendors like Red Hat, this requires a delicate balancing act.
The open source vendor just launched its Red Hat Catalyst program in North America, which will include an interactive Web portal to facilitate the formation of a community around its partner ecosystem, including resellers, system integrators, ISVs and hardware vendors. This is meant to help Red Hat partners penetrate the market around open source – estimated to be around US$30 billion and growing – and create total solutions.
Vizuri, for example, worked with Red Hat to develop a cloud-based Intelligent Data Center called Imperia, a Web hosting platform that uses Red Hat, JBoss, Hyperic and EnterpriseDB solutions. Down the road, the Red Hat Catalyst program is expected to include a social networking portal for discussion on these types of innovative solutions developed by the partner community.
For Red Hat and other open source vendors, the trick will be balancing their distribution relationships. In this case, both Synnex and Tech Data are endorsing the Red Hat Catalyst program. So how does that work, exactly?
Synnex says the program will help it identify and train new partners on open source applications by giving them the step-by-step materials they need to educate their customers on the various solution sets available. Its goal is to make the on-boarding process as smooth as possible for partners new to open source.
Tech Data says the program is an opportunity for its reseller and ISV community to better capitalize on the growing demand for open source solutions, especially in the areas of business intelligence, content management and database applications.
But we need to backtrack a bit. Back in April, Red Hat launched the Open Source Channel Alliance with Synnex, which involves a partnership between the distie and about a dozen open source application providers (including the likes of Alfresco, Jaspersoft and Zimbra). This provided these application providers with access to some 15,000 Synnex resellers targeting mid-market customers – in many cases, it would be the first time these application providers ever worked with a major distributor.
Rumour has it, though, that this put a strain on Red Hat’s relationship with Tech Data. Rumour also has it that Tech Data has been tossing around the idea of an Open Source Ecosystem, which is (not surprisingly) similar to the Open Source Channel Alliance. This, of course, would pit Tech Data directly against Synnex in the race to become the distributor of choice for open source.
Clearly, Red Hat is trying to maintain that balance through its Red Hat Catalyst program – tricky as that might be. But for the open source community, this kind of rivalry can only be considered good news.