Last week, Dell team members traveled to Boston to unite with the Red Hatters of the world at Red Hat Summit. We learned from others in the open source community, shared the findings and developments that we’ve discovered, announced our newest Red Hat technology-based offerings, and (my favorite part) we won the 2015 Strategic Alliance Partner of the Year Award. This award means a lot to us – not just because it means that we’re #1 in terms of the partnership and collaboration we’ve provided from engineering to sales to our executive leadership teams, but also because it represents the growth, innovation and evolution we’ve accomplished together over the past 15 years.
When we won the award, Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances at Red Hat told us, “Congratulations to the Dell team on winning the 2015 Strategic Alliance Partner of the Year Award. Dell and Red Hat have had a long and strong collaboration over the past 15 years, and we are happy to present you with this award based on your customer focus, value, contribution to the community and shared priorities. We look forward to many more years of continued openness and innovation.” – Now that makes us proud.
So let’s take a look at what led up to this award. In the year 2000, Dell made a decision to be the first tier one partner to OEM Red Hat technology. Since then, Dell has experienced a number of other “firsts” in the Red Hat world including being the first to factory install Red Hat Linux, as well as the first major OEM to join the OpenStack community and ship OpenStack solutions. Each of these opportunities to be the first to market is really a testament to the great relationships and trust we have amongst the Dell and Red Hat teams.
Currently Dell and Red Hat are exploring new opportunities as we work to democratize IT, making our technologies fast, easy and affordable. We’re seeing great success in the OpenStack space with customers like Yale-NUS College, which has chosen to establish a private cloud based on Dell and Red Hat’s co-engineered solution. The Dell Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 delivers compute performance where and when it’s needed, providing top of the line IT support for the school’s breakthrough research. Even better yet, the entire Yale-NUS cloud is so easy to use that it can be managed by a single administrator. That’s the type of technology that we’re proud to be a part of.
Now that Red Hat Summit has come to an end, our two teams will head back into our weekly joint planning and engineering meetings, and will continue collaborating on the next new and exciting offerings. Keep an eye out for our future announcements, because we’re not slowing down any time soon.
