On Tuesday Red Hat, Inc. announced the global launch of the Red Hat Partner Center, an online community and resource center for Red Hat Business Partners. The Center features a single portal for partners to access sales enablement tools including targeted marketing materials on cloud services, virtualization, platform and middleware solutions. The portal also includes an integrated case submission feature, deal registration, subscription management, training resources, specialization requests and upgrades, as well as an interactive online forum where partners can actively offer continuous feedback.

Red Hat's intention with the Partner Center is to enable partners to efficiently learn about Red Hat solutions to ultimately scale their businesses and ensure the success of end customers. With a specific focus on new offerings from Red Hat on virtualization and cloud, the company is working to provide partners with the support they need to give customers an easy on-ramp to the cloud.

“We are enabling our business partners and resellers to deliver Red Hat subscriptions in a flexible consumption based model. We recognize that every business has different requirements and our cloud strategy lends itself to flexibility in the way end users choose to deploy the operating platform, virtualization capabilities and middleware solutions,” said Mark Enzweiler, vice president, global channel sales, Red Hat. “Now, through the Red Hat Partner Center we are making it easier for our partners to bring these cutting-edge technologies to their customers.”

“Red Hat has been a trusted vendor for us and their new partner portal is simple to navigate and will allow us to expand our knowledge of Red Hat solutions including cloud, virtualization and middleware platforms. Our customers expect us to have the knowledgebase to help them take advantage of open source innovation and the Red Hat Partner Center will enable us to do that efficiently and effectively,” said Vikram Kumar, managing director, Unilogik Systems.

“Having a single on-demand resource like the Red Hat Partner Center will positively impact our business and our sales force, especially as more and more businesses seek to leverage the benefits of open source architecture,” said Erik Wallin, co-founder and COO, Shadow-Soft. “We've piloted the system and found it to be an invaluable tool, particularly the fact that sales marketing tools and deal registration is all in one platform.”