Red Hat is to assist its local channel with support, sales and technical training on the JBoss open source development platform.
According to Francois Lucatelli, Red Hat channel sales manager for southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), the time is ripe for the channel to get involved with JBoss sales and support.
"Four months ago Red Hat acquired JBoss," he says. "Now is an opportunity for the channel to assist its customers with its deployment and adoption of open source."
JBoss, an enterprise development platform based on Java, gets 150 000 to 200 000 downloads per month, according to Lucatelli.
"Generally it`s the developers who are downloading JBoss," he says. "It is important for the channel to know that although JBoss is not an easy product to deploy, it is accepted by customers already, at least on a developer level."
Robin Edser, GM of the Linux Warehouse, Red Hat`s local distributor, says although penetration of JBoss is high, only 3% of JBoss`s market share is paid-for subscriptions.
"Now that Red Hat has acquired JBoss, it can offer the right level of support for companies to use [JBoss] in production," he says. "It already has a very strong brand; our goal will be to show the market that they can use it in production as well."
Lucatelli says Red Hat will host a three-day training session for existing channel partners before the end of the year.
"We will offer training on JBoss - both on the sales and technical side. The product is not only an application server but also includes messaging, hibernate, portals, transactions, Tomcat and Apache. It`s the kind of product that customers will look to their technology partners to help them with."
Red Hat beat Oracle to the punch when it acquired JBoss earlier this year, prompting some speculation that Oracle`s recent announcement of cut-price support for Red Hat was revenge. Lucatelli was not drawn on the Oracle announcement.
"Our official response to the Oracle announcement is at www.redhat.com," he says.
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