Red Hat: Five Questions for Roger Egan

The VAR Guy expects Roger Egan, Red Hat‘s North America channel chief, to surface at CompTIA Breakaway (Aug. 1-4, Washington, D.C.). With a little luck and some cell phone speed dialing, The VAR Guy expects to grab Egan for some coffee and conversation about Red Hat’s partner program. In between sips of Latte, here are five questions The VAR Guy plans to raise with Egan.

1. Dollars and Cents: Historically speaking, roughly 50 to 60 percent of Red Hat’s revenues have come from channel partners, VARs and technology consultants. As Red Hat marches toward $1 billion in annual revenues how rapidly are partner-centric revenues growing?

2. JBoss Evolution: JBoss, Red Hat’s open source middleware platform, has been a hit with some integrators — who typically earn $10 to $12 in consulting fees for every $1 worth of JBoss revenue they generate. But are those numbers holding up, or is the JBoss market maturing?

3. Virtualization Update: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), based on KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), is Red Hat’s answer to VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V. But how is RHEV scaling so far, and what role are channel partners playing.

4. The Big Cloud: Red Hat has multiple cloud strategies in play, including OpenShift (Platform as a Service, or PaaS) and CloudForms (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS). So far, so good. But here again, where will channel partners play?

5. The Big Event: Red Hat is planning its first dedicated North America Partner Conference (Oct. 25-27, Miami, Fla.). What big themes can partners expect to hear? Hopefully, Egan will share a few teaser details.

That’s all for now. The VAR Guy looks forward to potentially catching up with Egan and other channel leaders at CompTIA Breakaway.