“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go with the team,” an eye-opening statement made by Albert Chai, General Manager of Red Hat RoSEA and one of the speakers in the media briefing of Red Hat Partner Synergy Malaysia 2022.

As a renowned open source solutions company, Red Hat realises how imperative it is to establish a partner ecosystem. This is in line with their hope of becoming a catalyst for Malaysian communities to transform technology utilising open source.

Public and private businesses must adapt to the IT landscape. Adopting Red Hat solutions, for instance, will allow businesses to meet the upswing in expectations of consumers and society alike. What the future holds for companies is virtual working and the implementation of the hybrid workforce.

Implying that the adoption of emerging technologies and migration towards hybrid cloud systems is the trajectory for businesses. Open source does not only mean open technology and open architecture but also entails open culture.

Country Manager of Red Hat Malaysia, Tammy Tan shares why partners are the key to their success, “90% of Red Hat’s APAC business is through partners. Our partners, together with us provide an industry-relevant solution to the community. Red Hat truly believes that open hybrid cloud strategy is the key in transforming our applications, our infrastructure and processes in order to truly deliver a flexible and secured cloud experience.”

Tammy continues to inform us that Red Hat partners are categorised into three types:

• Premier Partner. Develops a strategic relationship with Red Hat. They are more inclined to find new opportunities and are the biggest contributors to the partner ecosystem.

• Advanced Business Partner. Gets to enjoy enhanced benefits while also having access to extra resources to construct an open source enterprise and increase their revenue.

• Ready Partner. Partners grow using their Red Hat enterprise open source practice while building Red Hat Datacentre Infrastructure, Middleware Solutions, and Cloud Infrastructure proficiencies.

Evidently, a Forrester study reveals that with Red Hat OpenShift, partners stand to gain many benefits, including potential opportunities for increased revenue, larger deal sizes, more closed deals, and more strategic value to customers. In fact, Red Hat partners are increasing their number of deals on average by 30% per year.

Red Hat is also offering Red Hat Training and Certification to their customers and partners. This is to ensure that their partners can expand hybrid cloud technology further and upskill their workforce.

The Red Hat media briefing included a fireside chat with two of their partners, CTC Global Malaysia and Affiniti Data Malaysia. Both representatives discussed why they chose Red Hat as a business partner and how they empower innovation with their customers.

Managing Director of Affiniti Malaysia, Ho Chee Chew, stated that Red Hat is aligned with Affiniti Data who specialise in software development, “We’ve been working with Red Hat since 2016. They are helpful in solutioning and providing precious industrial practices. We do end-to-end solutions on social welfare projects. We position Red Hat as the middleware to enhance the solution for quicker response and smoother user experience. We also help to build microservice solutions and API.”

One example that Ho shared during the briefing is PERKESO. Affiniti helps with the system engagement of PERKESO so customers can experience faster response times. Online transactions are now possible without visiting a PERKESO branch.

Dennis Koh, Managing Director at CTC Global Malaysia, explained further, “The trend is heading towards open source. Therefore, Red Hat is an obvious choice. It is to ensure that applications are brought in at a rapid pace into containerisation. Mission-critical applications require support including open source. This also means that deployment and security are significant. It is important to have technology that runs well and have a change management system.”

Dennis acknowledged that Red Hat OpenShift filled this gap. Their strength in deploying applications cannot be denied. He gave the instance of MySejahtera which can launch new features every day to suit consumer needs and/or to comply with government policies.