Cloud News
Red Hat Chairman Paul Cormier: ‘Even A Direct Account Will Be With Partners’
Wade Tyler Millward
‘We pared down by two-thirds the number of accounts we’re going to call on directly—and even a direct account will be with partners. But everything else will be even directly serviced by our partners,’ says Red Hat Chairman Paul Cormier.

What’s your message to channel partners as chairman of Red Hat?
It’s really a much more focused approach with partners. Hybrid cloud is not a product, it’s an architecture.
And it takes various products from companies like us as well as partner companies. We can’t do it all. It takes consulting services. It takes all kinds of partners to deliver that.
And so we really talked about that a lot at the Summit in May. That was a real focus for us.
We pared down by two-thirds the number of accounts we’re going to call on directly—and even a direct account will be with partners. But everything else will be even directly serviced by our partners.
We really made that very, very clear. We put a new ecosystem SVP [senior vice president] in place, Stefanie Chiras, who came from the products group. Because it’s not only a partner-led thing, it’s not only an architecture, it’s very much a technical solution, as well.
So that that will continue. We just started with that focus not that long ago. And that’s really been a really cornerstone of the strategy going forward.