Red Hat or Juniper Partner Conference (How About Both)?

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The goal: Attend both. Red Hat North American Partner Conference (January 14-16, 2013, San Diego). The open source vendor is positioning the confab as an opportunity for partners to fully understand Red Hat’s expanding portfolio (cloud, virtualization, platform, middleware, storage and management), and its deepening commitment to the channel under North American Channel Chief Roger Egan’s direction. Red Hat expects at least 400 partners to attend the event.

Red Hat’s North America Partner expo will be its third annual event devoted to channel partners—the prior two were held in Las Vegas and Miami. The vendor also offers partner-centric sessions during its Red Hat Summit, the most recent of which was held this past June in Boston.

Meanwhile, Juniper will host its second annual global partner summit the same week. Our big question: Juniper currently works with some of the world’s largest managed services providers (AT&T, Orange, Verizon). But can Juniper put a face on mid-market and smaller MSPs that are succeeding with the company, especially as rival Cisco Systems merges its cloud and MSP partner program into a single channel initiative?

The VAR Guy’s editorial team is sorting through schedules now and hopes to attend both events…

Additional insights from The VAR Guy.