Red Hat at this week’s Red Hat Summit 2018 conference revealed several technology alliances involving its distribution of Kubernetes, a container orchestration engine that is rapidly become a de facto industry standard.
Accenture, Atos, DXC Technology, HCL Technologies, and Wipro are now all building practices around Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. At the same time, however, Red Hat and Microsoft announced their intention to jointly deliver managed OpenShift service running on the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Lenovo, meanwhile, announced this week that will bundle Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on its server platforms, and Intel committed to optimizing an edition of the Select Systems it provides for a variety of OpenShift workloads.
Finally, IBM also extended its long-time alliance with Red Hat to include an instance of OpenShift running on a private cloud managed by IBM.
John Allessio, vice president of global services, told conference attendees that building out an ecosystem around the Red Hat platform has been a high priority. Most notably, Red Hat has significantly expanded the number of sales and technical training provided via the Red Hat
Online Partner Enablement Network by 70 percent. Red Hat also expanded its training efforts to increase the pool of IT professionals that organizations can hire.
“We trained 150,000 people in the last year,” says Allessio.
It’s not clear to what degree Red Hat’s ambitions to deliver managed services might conflict with practices channel partners are setting up. But as more organizations move to embrace both Kubernetes and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments that run on top of it, it’s clear demand for managed services to support these technologies is on the rise.
Organizations are being tasked to develop and update applications faster. To achieve that goal many of them are relying more on external providers to manage infrastructure so they can free up more of their internal resources to focus on application development.
Naturally, it will take several years for this transition to play out fully. But already managed service providers such as T-Systems are building practices around OpenShift platforms. The challenge facing channel partners now is finding IT professionals that are skilled in not just container technologies but also mastering the integrated DevOps processes required to manage them.
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