Channel Chat podcast: with Red Hat A/NZ director of partners and alliances Garry Gray

In July 2019, IBM closed its US$34 billion acquisition of open source enterprise software provider Red Hat. By August that year, IBM was already well on its way to aligning its own software with its newly acquired technology, saying at the time that its portfolio would be transformed to work cloud natively and augmented to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.

While IBM’s cloud-focused future appears to have a lot to do with Red Hat’s inclusion in its tech stack, Red Hat seems to view its future a little differently, with the company working to retain its independence as an IBM subsidiary and to largely continue doing what it was doing before the acquisition. 

Credit: Red Hat

Regardless, there have been some changes. In January this year, it was revealed that longtime Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become IBM president after former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty departed from her role to be replaced by the company’s former cloud lead Arvind Krishna. 

That shuffle, which was completed in April, saw Red Hat’s products and technologies president Paul Cormier become the company’s new CEO.

Just how those changes at the top might impact the company’s burgeoning channel activities, if at all, remains to be seen. But one thing is for certain, the company is very much continuing to ramp up its focus on partner engagement in the local market and indeed around the world. 

In this Channel Chat podcast, Leon Spencer, editor of ARN and Reseller News, speaks with Red Hat’s director of partners and alliances in Australia and New Zealand, Garry Gray, about the company's strategic path, post-acquisition, and what role the channel partner community is set to play in the company’s journey from here.

Channel Chat is a new podcast series in which we speak to leaders across the Australian and New Zealand IT channel about the latest trends, developments, ideas and events in the industry.