8 Top Programs for Open Source Partners: Red Hat, SUSE, MongoDB, More

For channel partners looking to grow their businesses, open source software channel partner programs are ripe for exploration. That’s because companies of all sizes are considering open source to solve business problems as they become more familiar with it.

That broadening familiarity comes through frequent innovations from larger open source vendors including Red Hat, SUSE and Google Cloud Platform. In just the last few months, the open source market has been busy with plenty of new tools for partners.

In July, SUSE unveiled its acquisition of Rancher Labs, which will give the company more Kubernetes management depth. The $600 million deal brings together two established open source vendors and deepens SUSE’s depth in the enterprise Kubernetes marketplace. Furthermore, the Rancher Labs platform lets users to deploy their containerized workloads anywhere, including the network edge and to the cloud. Partners and customers often asked SUSE to get more involved in Kubernetes management.

In June, Red Hat, IBM and SAP collaborated to adapt SAP’s cloud platform so it can run on premises. A ton of customers and partners requested that capability.

In April, Red Hat’s new CEO, Paul Cormier, stressed the importance of channel partners to his company. Cormier joined Red Hat in 2001 and has always focused on channel partner relationships. Those relationships, he said, will continue to fuel Red Hat’s steady growth with its wide range of enterprise applications. Today that includes platforms for cloud, Kubernetes, storage, middleware, virtualization and more. And the company’s $34 billion acquisition by IBM last year arguably gives channel partners even more growth opportunities.

And in May, SUSE deepened its Azure cloud integrations capabilities for customers, which also opens more doors for channel partners. More and more case studies show how open source helps businesses get things done. That, in turn, leads to more partner opportunity.

Open source channel partner programs are growing and adapting in response. Scroll through the slideshow above to see how open source channel partner programs are giving partners new opportunities.