Red Hat and Managed Services: Keep Your Options Open?

I’m in Cary, N.C., today meeting with a few companies — including Red Hat, which is widely considered the most successful publicly held open source company. Here’s what I hope to learn.

Red Hat will drive rough $332 million through partners and integrators this year, The VAR Guy (our sister site) has reported. And while Red Hat has hinted that it plans to take a closer look at managed services partnerships, I haven’t really seen an aggressive effort by the company to engage MSPs. I’ll dig for info to see if that’s changing.
Meanwhile, Red Hat has started to look at the software as a service (SaaS) industry. The company does have a partnership involving Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). And Red Hat is working closely with a growing list of hosting providers, ensuring that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the foundation for many hosted applications.

Will Red Hat make a more formalized push to engage MSPs? I hope to find some answers later today.