Red Hat Promotes Katie Giglio to Senior Director of Ecosystem Development
Giglio says Red Hat’s new Partner Subscriptions create fewer software use rights restrictions.
March 7, 2023
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Channel Futures: What are your key responsibilities in your new role?
Red Hat’s Katie Giglio: I now lead a larger organization solely focused on that full journey of identifying partners, recruiting them, doing incubation, and making sure that our go-to-market is ready so that our partner field teams can work with our direct sellers to deliver to the customer … a much more valued offering than just Red Hat products.
CF: When you say other than Red Hat products, what does that mean?
KG: Red Hat has a set of platforms, but our ecosystem truly delivers that open hybrid cloud possibility. And so how do we work with specific partners, whether they’re software hardware, who’s delivering workloads, and making sure that we have those tighter integrations.
CF: Do you oversee the new Partner Subscriptions?
KG: Partner Subscriptions fall very much into this because we do want to attract partners to work more with us. And a lot of that working with us is working with our technology and giving them the accessibility to do so. And so the change that we recently have come out with our Red Hat Partner Subscriptions is making it easy for partners to get their hands on the technology in a non-production and non-production fashion, to make it so that they can access a variety of different products without having to have different entitlements. That gives them ease and quicker time to revenue, to allow for multiple teams within the account to be able to make it so that they can work together in that development phase.
There are a lot of different ways in which we have accelerated what we would previously had called a “Not for Resale” offering. This is much more about how we work with you to build in the work that you want to do with our software.
CF: Is it best described as less restrictive, or you’re opening it up to more to stakeholders?
KG: That is correct. When it comes to restriction, any partner, whether you are a technology partner or partner or more of a reseller, once you sign an agreement with us, you have the opportunity to have a “not for resale” subscription in order to develop with the software. Though you had to go to different entitlements for each part of what you wanted to use, it was not easy for our partners. So we made that easier.
And then if you had other members of the organization, and you’re talking much larger organizations, there wasn’t a simple way to extend the entitlements to extend the usage. We’ve definitely made it much easier and reduced any kind of restrictions to expanding the scope of work, or the people that are going to work with us and with our software.
CF: Did IBM, your parent company, have any roll in helping you develop this?
KG: No. Actually, we learned from feedback. This was more from our partner survey that we run each year to see what we can do to improve.
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CF: Presumably your expectation or hope is this will result in partners building more applications and getting solutions to market.
KG: For sure, product adoption is very important for us. Within Red Hat, we put a lot of emphasis on our relationship with partners, and the experience they have with us. If there are friction areas, we do want to elevate what they are and find ways of improving them. At the end of the day, their ability to have more product adoption gives our customers the ability to have more product adoption. Whether it’s our Red Hat OpenShift platform, or whether it’s on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it’s only going to improve the customer experience with their ability to be more confident in our product.
CF: Are you looking to add partners?
KG: At Red Hat our open hybrid cloud strategy recognizes the value of partners and the role that partners play in delivering that transformation to customers. In order to do that, we have to have a very wide variety of partners within your ecosystem, who have skills and accreditations that can that you can build with on your technology, and that can also help you in the market to scale.
CF: Are you looking to add partners?
KG: At Red Hat our open hybrid cloud strategy recognizes the value of partners and the role that partners play in delivering that transformation to customers. In order to do that, we have to have a very wide variety of partners within your ecosystem, who have skills and accreditations that can that you can build with on your technology, and that can also help you in the market to scale.
Red Hat has named Katie Giglio senior director of ecosystem development. Red Hat promoted the four-year company veteran to the position, which opened following the departure of Lars Herrmann. He left Red Hat after 20 years to become VP of MongoDB’s partner ecosystem.
Red Hat’s Katie Giglio
Giglio previously was director of product marketing, though she maintains she has worked closely with Red Hat’s ecosystem.
Here’s our list of channel people on the move in February. |
“While my background is product marketing, I have been within the partner ecosystem for the past four years,” she said. “I have worked with partners for 20 plus years at a variety of different companies. So partnering is really my way of life.”
In her new role, Giglio reports to Stefanie Chiras, senior VP of Red Hat’s partner ecosystem success. Giglio now leads Red Hat’s ecosystem development team.
“We have a collection of folks who help in terms of co-creating with those partners, and then also helping with any technology development, and then making sure that they’re in a readiness state in order to go to market in our field,” she told Channel Futures.
In the slideshow above, Giglio discusses her responsibilities, IBM, and the future of the Red Hat channel.
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