Big Blue has said that it will not be merging its partner programme with that of Red Hat after the completion of its $34 billion acquisition deal.
IBM is keen to keep Red Hat’s continued independence and position as “the Switzerland of IT”.
IBM’s senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software Arvind Krishna said that Red Hat supports every hardware vendor out there and that is going to continue.
“It’s not for IBM sales teams to go look into and interfere. All of those aspects of what we mean by neutrality and independence. Both companies have a sales force, meaning then both companies have a channel partnership programme. People who want to sell Red Hat products have to be a member of the Red Hat channel programme, which is different than the IBM channel programme, People who are selling IBM products will be in the IBM channel programme; very straightforward. We would love for every possible partner to be in both, but they’re not becoming one.”
Red Hat’s executive vice president of products and technologies Paul Cormier said that IBM recognised as much if not more than Red Hat, on how important its independence was into keeping the ecosystem growing.
