Our program is designed to help you build or certify software or hardware, sell more customer-driven solutions, or provide high-quality services using the latest Red Hat technology. Whatever your business goals and challenges, our partner program offerings can help you find success through collaboration.

We seek to foster deeper involvement between us and our partners and create more opportunities to work together. By easing access to information, insights, and resources, we can collaborate better with you to address unique customer challenges in competitive markets. This kind of enablement, activation, and incentivization is core to how we engage with you as partners. Your feedback helped us realize a need to create a system that’s more flexible, simple, and transparent.

As announced in our January 2024 press release and our July 2024 blog post, instead of separate partner programs differentiated by partner type, we are building a single global program designed for all partners. Within this single global partner program are modules, each of which represent a set of activities and benefits that align with how you choose to do business with Red Hat.

You will experience program enhancements in 2024 if you are:

• An authorized partner reselling Red Hat’s software and services to customers
• A partner involved in distributing Red Hat products to resellers and across diverse markets
• A partner collaborating directly with Red Hat to jointly sell and deliver solutions

Plans for additional modules beyond the resell, distribution, and sell-with focuses will be announced in the future.

Our program’s new modular structure lets you self-select activities—allowing you to focus on activities without having to navigate between individual partner programs. The modules in this global program reflect the many different ways that you bring Red Hat technologies and solutions to your customers. Red Hat partners will automatically be placed in specific modules. but can work through additional modules as they see fit.

Yes, we are building out a globally consistent framework that aligns partners by engagement, expertise, and performance level. These changes will give you greater visibility into tier status, engagement activities, and recognition for bookings, influence, and revenue.

To encourage and support your ongoing customer involvement, a new global interface and policies will be implemented to register new deals and apply for new incumbency incentives on previously registered deals. Enhancements to the market development fund processes will launch in the future with rebates and an even more encompassing set of partner benefits and incentives.

While we always recommend checking with your partner account manager to discuss tiering status and opportunities, our tiering system can be generally categorized into 3 types:

• Ready tier: Partners that are beginning their engagement with Red Hat or seeking to broaden their commercial customer base.
• Advanced tier: Partners that are focused on increasing their Red Hat revenue streams through effective selling, upselling, and cross-selling within their existing customer portfolio.
• Premier tier: Partners that have higher-volume customer demands, long-term strategic customer relationships, and go-to-market commitments. Premier partners have access to high-visibility opportunities to advance their business model with Red Hat.

Partner tiers are assigned based on points that are accumulated across all modules and partner entities within each calendar year. Once you meet the required points threshold, you can maintain or advance to your desired tier.

To secure your placement in the appropriate tier for 2025, you need to accrue the necessary activity points by December 31, 2024. You can track your progress by logging into the partner relationship management platform.

You can accrue points by executing on activity modules that recognize progress in administrative, enablement, sales, marketing, and technical tasks. Check your partner profile for more detailed guidance on how to accumulate and retain points as part of unlocking additional benefits and opportunities.

Our revised approach to partner benefits now takes into account more than just your financial results. You will now be rewarded for emphasizing goals, relationships, and sales, creating a fuller picture of your efforts as a Red Hat partner.

As the hub of your digital experience as a Red Hat partner, Red Hat Partner Connect is your starting point for information, support, training, and rewards. We are planning to roll out unified access, streamlined navigation, and more seamless reporting and tracking of opportunities.

A single sign-on (SSO) will streamline the login process, and a unified navigation will provide more direct access to activities and tooling throughout Red Hat Partner Connect. We hope to make new opportunities easier for you to find and provide enhanced access to data and metrics. All of this will be bundled in a new portal interface that suggests helpful tips for how best to recognize and implement this new functionality.

A lot is changing—but we’re here to help. You can reach out to your partner account manager or explore all the help and support options that are available to you as part of starting the conversation.