Red Hat appoints new channels head

Red Hat India has appointed Adrian Pereira as its new channel head, who will be responsible for the company´s Indian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese operations. Adrian was earlier associated with Ingram Micro working as a Product Manager and has been specifically appointed to enhance Red Hat's channel focus. 

"We have not been very focused on the channels, so my primary job would be to have a strong partner focus and get them come closer to the company. In the next three months, we would be organizing training programs, events and promotional schemes for the partners and would make our relationship with them on a more one-to-one basis," Adrain says. 

Red Hat India today has 40 channel partners in the country and two branch offices in Delhi and Bangalore apart from its head office in Mumbai. The company feels that Linux and open source are picking up in the country and thus it is very important to have channel partners who have strong hold in IT. 

"We are aware of the fact that it is our channel partners who would sell the solutions in the market. Be it BFSI, government, corporate, we would make sure that we provide enough hand-holding to our partners who would then be able to deploy customer-centric solutions," Adrian adds. 

Red Hat India's business grew by more than 100% on a year-on-year basis from 2003 to 2004. Adrain points out that the company is becoming more aggressive this year and wants to achieve more than the growth it quoted last fiscal. The vendor has recently worked with the Madhya Pradesh government and is confident that more government institutions would open up to Linux platform. "We will ensure that we push our channels in the right direction with the right solution and that would be the key to our success," Adrian reflects. 

The company has three distributors--Sonata, Integral Dataware and GT Enterprises. While the first two are national distributors, the latter is promoting the company in the southern region. "We would like to have a firm base in the channel community within three months," Adrian remarks. 

The company also plans to organize end-user events in A, B and C class cities in June and July, where it would invite the existing and prospective customers. "Our aim is to make people aware of the benefits of open source which would help the penetration of Linux in the country," he adds. 

Atanu Kumar Das

New Delhi