‘One of the advantages of having Red Hat technology is whatever you’ve purchased before is what you’re going to leverage moving down this AI continuum as well,’ says Kevin Kennedy, vice president of global ecosystem.
Virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud are “the three pillars of revenue drivers” for Red Hat and its solution providers as artificial intelligence projects continue through experimentation phases.
Kevin Kennedy, the recently installed channel chief for the Raleigh, N.C.-based IBM division and open-source enterprise software vendor, told CRN in an interview that Red Hat technology is prime for customers who don’t want to cast aside all of their prior technology investments and applications, instead looking to modernize for AI or other use cases.
“One of the advantages of having Red Hat technology is whatever you’ve purchased before is what you’re going to leverage moving down this AI continuum as well,” Kennedy said. “You’re not going to have to rip and replace. It’s not an ‘either-or.’ It’s a ‘both-and.’”
[RELATED: Red Hat Channel Chief Chiras Changes Roles, Kennedy Becomes Interim Leader]
Red Hat Partner Program
Kennedy, whose official title is vice president of the global ecosystem, became permanent channel chief in January. He took over the role in October on an interim basis after his predecessor, Stefanie Chiras, became senior vice president of The Open Accelerator, an IBM and Red Hat innovation hub in Boston.
Along with the market opportunities for Red Hat solution providers, Kennedy broke down ways the vendor is looking to reward partners that deliver net-new customers, that cross-sell and upsell, and that land new skilling badges and specializations.
“We’re not really looking to reward, ‘Hey, you did $100,000 with us last year—we’re going to go renew that at $100,000 again,’” Kennedy said. “There’s nothing really spectacular about that for anybody. I would say the same thing about our direct sellers. My expectation for the partner [is] they continue to work with that customer.”
Here is more of what Kennedy had to say about business opportunities for solution providers in 2026 and this new era for the vendor’s partner ecosystem.
What do you want Red Hat partners to know now that you’re officially the channel chief?
Going into this year, we’ve got incremental incentives that we’re offering to the partners that I’m thrilled about.
It demonstrates the continued commitment from our senior leadership—from [President and CEO] Matt Hicks to [Senior Vice President and CRO] Andrew Brown on down—of the criticality of the ecosystem to the future success of Red Hat.
Previously, if you’ll remember, we would do maybe a rebate. That was the same for everybody. It didn’t matter what tier you were.
My strategy going forward is a little different than that, where I want to differentiate based on the partners that we think are the most strategic, the most skilled, the most critical to our success.
And I want to make sure those partners that are the most invested with us are able to reap the greatest rewards. So we have differentiated some of the rebates based on the tiering.
The more skills you’ve demonstrated, the more investment you’re making in us, the greater profitability you’re going to have as a result of the program.
And then we’ve made some differentiations based on sales segment, too. [For example], we’re very focused around this commercial segment. That’s, for us, the opportunity to go find net-new Red Hat customers, which is critical. That’s going to be the lifeblood of our future.
What are we doing [is] to incentivize a partner seller to care about that because we’ve not always been clear with those ideas or ambitions that we have for them by stacking incentives in place to lead them where we want them to go.
We’ve made some differentiation even on our deal [registration] process so that the deal [registrations] are richer in commercial than in enterprise.
We’ve maintained the same level we’ve had for the last year or so [in enterprise]. We’ll leave that the same for enterprise, but we really want to make it more lucrative for a partner seller to go hunt in that commercial space, to go help us bring on those net-new customers.
So I’m really pumped about that. The initial feedback we’ve gotten from partners has been extremely positive.
How about in skilling, anything changing there for Red Hat partners?
[Partners can] stack some incentives on top of each other [if they are] a Red Hat Specialized Partner—[formerly] our PPA [Partner Practice Accelerator] program that we’ve morphed into this Red Hat Specialized Partner Program—which would show you’ve got skills in automation or you have got skills in virtualization.
We’re going to broaden that. We’ve got these things called TDPs, which are technical decision points. And we’ll have certifications or requirements around each one of those to become a specialized partner that’ll come out throughout the year. But it gives a partner more incentives.
You’re investing in Red Hat resources, you can see your way clearly to how you get an ROI on that business.
If you’re a specialized partner, you’re closing business, you’re going to get an incremental incentive. If you’re doing that in commercial, even more so.
Those are really important pivots for us that I think starts to reward those invested partners and differentiate them.
Why make these changes to the partner program?
The whole purpose of the Red Hat Specialized Partner program—we’ve validated their statements of work. We’ve heard from their customers where they’ve done the services that they were successful in that engagement.
All that stuff becomes part of getting that stamp of approval and say, ‘Yes, you’re a Red Hat Specialized Partner.’
So for future customers—not the ones we’ve used, maybe even as the references, but for future customers—that’s a badge of credibility.
We’ve gone through this arduous process, Red Hat has given us this stamp of approval, so you can feel secure as a customer that whatever you go and buy—whether it’s the total solution, and it’s the delivery of that solution, it’s the life-cycle management—that this partner has demonstrated the capabilities to do that as well or better than we could if you were doing this with Red Hat direct resources themselves.
That’s part of the why. The other part is, clearly, we all are challenged with how do you manage a finite budget. And where we’ve maybe historically spread it around, I think our effectiveness might not have been as great.
We can start to channel it to a set of partners [with which] we’ve demonstrated we’ve got that cooperative capability.
You’ve invested in us. We’ve invested in you. That gives us the opportunity to one, demonstrate that it’s a profitable endeavor to partner with Red Hat.
That gives our sellers a lot of confidence that these are partners that know us well, that know how to deliver our solutions, that can present our value proposition to a customer in a way that will be advantageous to us.
You can know that that partner can go on a sales call without you if you’re an AE [account executive] and you’re in a co-sell motion you don’t have to be worried about something’s going to be … undermined or they’re not going to understand the solution.
That’s all out of your mind now. And you can go focus on how do I maximize the opportunities in my territory leveraging the ecosystem to help me do that?
How about the cross-sell, upsell incentive for partners—and is Red Hat rewarding customer maintenance as much as it’s rewarding net-new customer acquisition?
[If] we’ve got customers that have one of our platforms, it’s really advantageous for us to have them have more than one. It’s a much stickier relationship for us long term. So we also have additional incentives for a cross-sell, upsell.
[If] you’re a real customer, now I’m going to go and I’m going to sell you Ansible [Red Hat’s open-source IT automation engine]. That’s a great thing for the customer. Great thing for the partner.
It could be [a net-new opportunity]. It does give you an opportunity for increased profitability, even in an existing account.
We’re not really looking to reward, ‘Hey, you did $100,000 with us last year—we’re going to go renew that at $100,000 again.’
There’s nothing really spectacular about that for anybody. I would say the same thing about our direct sellers. My expectation for the partner [is] they continue to work with that customer.
And so that renewal would be, instead of $100,000 maybe it’s $125,000. Oh, and by the way, we’re also going to sell some net-new Ansible into that same account because they’ve got a fragmented environment. We’re going to give them that one pane of glass, go automate the whole thing through Ansible, etc.
The net new is truly net new. This customer has not done business with Red Hat before. And this is an opportunity to introduce them to our portfolio. And we understand that’s a heavy lift.
It’s a heavy lift for our sales teams. It’s a heavy lift for our partners. Where we think the partners can help accelerate that for us is for most of these partners, they’ve sold into these accounts that may not be Red Hat customers today, but they’ve sold into them historically with some of their other lines of business.
Maybe they’ve had services engagements. And so they’re really not going in there cold. They’re going into a customer they already have familiarity with. And they’re just introducing new technology around what Red Hat brings to the table.
We believe it’s going to be a win-win. It’s a partner giving their customer even greater line of sight as to how they might help them in their technology journey. And for us, it’s producing our stuff into customers that maybe are unfamiliar with what we can do for them.
Hopefully, you know, that’s a winning formula. And again, we’re heavily incentivizing the partners and rewarding them for that behavior.
Is Red Hat better aligning its internal sellers with partners?
Absolutely. We look across the continuum of our types of partners. We’ve got our VARs and resellers.
You’ve got our distributors that are critically important to us.
Our ISVs and our systems integrators—those are the ones where we see a lot more of that co-selling motion taking place that you’re referring to, and especially when we look at what’s coming in the future.
They’re setting the table for us with customers to have discussions that will result in revenue for us maybe two, three, four quarters from now, not necessarily in the immediate short term.
And then we’ve really started to see our hyperscaler business take off. Our cloud business had tremendous growth over the last couple of years. And that’s just because we’re giving the customers options and how they want to deploy our software. You want it to be on-prem? You want it to be in the cloud? Going with Red Hat gives you that flexibility.
That’s our specialty, hybrid cloud. Nothing has to change. You don’t have to change anything around your applications. You don’t have to change anything around the Red Hat technology. You can port those things seamlessly back and forth, which is huge.
All of that has really set us up for a great opportunity in the future.
How is Red Hat getting closer to distributors?
Part of our engagement model, and especially in this commercial space, is we’ve got a lot of partners who are still primarily transactional.
We want to encourage that. We’re really leaning on distribution to support that type of partner.
They’re doing a lot of that one-to-many training and enablement for us. They’re taking on a lot of that transactional responsibility.
We’re starting to engage in a much deeper level for them from a quoting perspective. We’ve put some pretty great incentives in place for them around supporting this net-new motion as well. We just constantly find more and more opportunity.
The channel discussions we’re having with our OEM and ISV partners, that all is going to converge within distribution. And then we’ll leverage those partners that either that ISV or that OEM and Red Hat share in common to go deliver that go-to-market message to the customer.
They’ll probably build some services orientation around that. But we’re seeing a ton of opportunity in that meet-in-the-channel model, leveraging distribution as that aggregator to bring it all together.
We leverage the three global distributors pretty heavily, with TD Synnex, Arrow [Electronics] and Ingram [Micro] being foremost.
We have some really key regional ones in EMEA and APAC [Asia-Pacific] as well.
We’ve gotten probably the most traction with those three globals. They’ve made a lot of forward-thinking investments. They do a lot with a lot of the OEM partners that we are partnered with as well. It makes for a much easier conversation and a much more productive go-to-market discussion around how we do some of these meet-in-the-channel motions.
What are some of the biggest opportunities ahead for Red Hat partners?
Some of the vertical industries—telco, the financial segment, health care, government—those all continue to be huge vertical markets for all of our portfolio.
Virtualization, automation, hybrid cloud will continue to be top of mind. Those will be the three pillars of revenue drivers.
AI, of course, we’re engaged in a lot of productive conversations around AI. We’ve got a lot of real opportunities and pipeline in front of us. We’ve closed some really good deals over the last year.
But I will caveat that by saying we’re not going to see that revenue outpace the revenue that we’re going to see with hybrid cloud, virtualization, automation. Those are going to still need to be the bulk of what we do to drive the innovation in the conversations we’re having around AI.
One of the advantages of having Red Hat technology is whatever you’ve purchased before is what you’re going to leverage moving down this AI continuum as well. You’re not going to have to rip and replace. It’s not an ‘either-or.’ It’s a ‘both-and.’
We’ve prepared a lot of our customers for this maturation toward AI however they decide to deploy it—whether that’s really in one or two use cases or it’s more broadly across the enterprise. Whatever it is, we’re going to be able to help them in that journey.
What patterns do you see in what excites net-new customers about Red Hat?
It still goes back to RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux]. That is our foundational product. That is still what we will leverage to go bring new customers into the Red Hat family.
It gives us an opportunity to demonstrate [that] flexibility of moving from an on-prem to a cloud environment, for instance. To build upon a foundation that, as the dynamics in technology change, won’t require you to do massive change to your underpinning operating systems. That still becomes the most attractive piece.
Ansible gives us a lot of flexibility outside of an operating system. [Partners can] go into somebody that’s running the multiple networks—maybe they’ve got Cisco, they’ve got Juniper [acquired by HPE] and they’ve got Aruba, they can still leverage Ansible to go manage that network infrastructure across disparate networks as one pane of glass to automate the entirety of that system. That’s a unique offering for us.
OpenShift virtualization, we’ll see that continue to be a tremendous growth opportunity for us moving forward. We spent two years ago setting the table. Last year, we started to realize a lot of that opportunity. I think the acceleration comes this year.
What should Red Hat partners know about Red Hat’s relationship with parent IBM?
Our partnership with IBM continues to be tighter and tighter.
When the acquisition was first taking place, we were still operating as two separate and distinct organizations.
We’ve come together in so many ways, whether that’s them moving resources to us, us moving resources to them where it was appropriate. We’ve got our sales teams working very collaboratively on some of our biggest accounts to drive tremendous solutions for our customers that are also mutually beneficial for both IBM and for Red Hat separately.
I’m encouraged by all the joint innovation that’s taking place between IBM and Red Hat. That’s going to be a real, huge advantage for our customers and our partners moving forward.
What else should partners look forward to as 2026 unfolds?
I really can’t underestimate the power of our evolution in our ecosystem.
Most of my background has been in direct sales motion, whether that was working for an OEM [Kennedy’s resume includes time with Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) before joining EMC through its VCE acquisition and then joining Dell Technologies through its EMC acquisition] and running global distribution, or working for a distributor [his resume also includes about 10 years on and off with Arrow Electronics and about five years with Tech Data and then TD Synnex].
I started my career carrying a bag and selling directly and all that kind of stuff. But what I’m really pumped about for Red Hat to be able to recognize and realize is the power of that indirect sales motion.
We’ve done a great job, historically, collaborating and partnering and taking advantage of some of the skills that partners have brought to bear. We have now turned the page and recognized that we have barely scraped the surface in the past of doing this. And our opportunity is to tremendously accelerate that partnership in ways where our partners can work autonomously.
We don’t need to be involved in every deal they’re working on. We can provide them the resources, the training, the enablement for them to go off on their own.
But then also for us to figure out that they can introduce us into markets and customers where maybe we haven’t been as successful. And they’re going to help us re-engage and achieve results that we would have not foreseen.
That endorsement that we’ve gotten from Matt Hicks and Andrew Brown through increased resources and incentives, etc., it’s a clear recognition that they see the opportunity that the ecosystem presents.
Do you want to see the Red Hat partner program grow in number of partners?
I want to grow the partner program in terms of the amount of incentives that we have to offer them. The more successful that we are, the more opportunity I have to go back and say, ‘Hey, if you give me more, we can expect more.’
I’m not necessarily looking to grow the number of partners. I’m more interested in growing the quality of partners.
We’re going to bring new partners on because as new partners come on, especially with AI, we’re going to have [them] come on to a market that we’re unfamiliar with or they’re going to build on our platform.
We’re going to be thrilled about that and embrace that. And it’s going to provide us line-of-sight into opportunities in the future that we don’t even see today.
But if I look at the current landscape of partners that we have, we’ve got some tremendously talented partners that I want to make sure they have everything they need to be successful. Because the more successful they are, the more successful we’re going to be.
So I’m not looking to go sprinkle the infield of partners. I’m looking to really double down with some of the partners we already have and demonstrate my commitment to them so that they can feel supported, that they can go out and go hunt on our behalf, and we can reap mutually beneficial rewards.
AI has technology buyers and solution providers asking who will be here in the long run—why should they invest in Red Hat?
A lot of customers are really still in the discovery phase and trying to figure out—am I going to do something with AI? If so, what? How does it apply to me? [They are] needing some direction and some counsel.
For a lot of partners or customers, they aren’t even really, today, set up to even move forward with AI because they’ve got a lot of chaos in their own IT environment.
They may have a lot of disparate systems. They’ve got modernization that needs to take place so that they’re even able to engage. That’s where we come in to help.
We can go get them to a place where they’re modernized, they’re standardized. And then we can also help them in that consultation around where do you go with AI? How big or how wide?
By leveraging what you’ve already invested from a modernization and standardization standpoint, all you’re doing is building upon that. This is a natural progression of our solution versus, ‘Hey, you’ve got one operating system over here. You’ve got one automation platform over there. Now you want to introduce a third, AI. And these things don’t all talk together. How are you going to work it? How many people is it going to take for you to knit all this stuff together? How productive can you be in that environment?’
We bring all that stuff under one umbrella and then give them the opportunity to immediately be productive, immediately see a return or a benefit, drive an outcome, whatever the case may be.
Should Red Hat partners focus more on the cloud and hybrid opportunity instead of AI?
Everyone has to be prepared for the AI conversation because it’s top of mind. [But] how quickly are you going to monetize AI? How quickly is that going to become the core part of the revenue that’s generated?
For certain companies, that answer is going to vary. But that’s why it’s still compelling when we’re talking about the hybrid cloud opportunity in front of us, the virtualization [opportunity].
That doesn’t detract from the AI conversation. In a lot of cases, that may help you accelerate your AI discussion. But it’s also going to be the thing that’s paying the bills in the interim.
It’s the thing that’s going to keep the lights on, keep the plumbing going and allow you to have those innovative discussions that may be a little more in the future while recognizing the opportunity that’s represented in the here and now.
What should partners know about the private cloud and sovereign cloud opportunity?
We’re seeing a lot of those conversations taking place. That’s becoming a much more prevalent discussion point.
Public cloud, we’re still going to see tremendous growth there. But there are some customers that are trying to figure out this whole sovereign cloud thing with some of the security and some of the applications that they want to keep in house.
How is that going to work with some of the AI solutions that maybe they’re trying to build internally? Where is that going to reside? Is that going to be something they need to keep on- prem?
It’s probably going to be a hybrid. They’re going to be a hybrid. They are going to be some things that are going to be maybe in a sovereign cloud. They’re going to be some things that are going to be sitting in a public cloud.
Compliance, governance, security—those are the words that keep our developers up at night to ensure that we’re ticking all those boxes.
