Red Hat CEO: Partners have ‘massive added value’ with AI

May 24, 2023 at 12:10 PM EDT

“When you look at the whole class of ecosystems built around AI, this is going to be one of the most exciting value-add ecosystem shuffles we’ve seen to date,” said Red Hat CEO. Matt Hicks told CRN.

Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks told CRN that the new wave of artificial intelligence (AI) innovations hitting the market today presents immense opportunities for channel partners to add value and grow closer to their customers. Told.

In an interview with CRN at the Red Hat Summit 2023 in Boston this week, Hicks said, “When you think about the channel side, there’s a ton of added value to AI.” “From your customer’s data and your understanding of your customer’s data, and how to train that data without putting it in the public domain, you get the recommendations that your model might come from, where they come from, and Don’t include your product or don’t include it in your product.”

Hicks said Red Hat’s AI capabilities for training environments and the acceleration of development projects into production represent significant managed services revenue opportunities for channel partners.

[Related: Red Hat CEO Keynote: 5 Boldest Remarks On AI, New Products]

“When you look at the whole ecosystem built around AI, this is going to be one of the most exciting value-adding ecosystem shuffles we’ve seen yet. This is very interesting because we want to bring consistency so that new partners and partner types can add value and be able to do it quickly,” said Red Hat’s CEO. “They know the basics. Their jobs range from production environments to training locations.”

Hicks said that Red Hat almost always focuses on its partners, saying, “Whether it’s a partner adding a workload, a partner managing a workload, or a partner deploying it, partners are It’s the last mile rink,” he said.

Red Hat partner CTS is bullish on AI

Converge Technology Solutions (CTS) is a $12 billion solutions provider and a Red Hat partner since 2016.

The Toronto-based company said Red Hat is focused on bringing efficiency and repeatability to the deployment and lifecycle management of AI workloads.

“Red Hat provides the foundation of the operating platform for AI workloads,” said Greg Rhoades, CTS US Chief Technology Officer. “They have recently further partnered with IBM to bring some additional technology to these capabilities.” But the advantage of the Red Hat platform is that it can really extend anywhere a customer needs to run his AI capabilities. “

CTS has an entire data science group focused on the science of AI, machine learning and deep learning technologies.

Andrew Tenaglia, vice president of app modernization at CTS, said the company’s future in AI is bright as Red Hat focuses on building new partnerships with vendors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. .

New event-driven Ansible from Red Hat

One of CTS’s strongest offerings is Red Hat’s new Event-Driven Ansible as part of Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.

Red Hat’s new event-driven Ansible seeks to expand the ways users can enable automation across hybrid clouds. It aims to reduce the risk of IT infrastructure errors and degradation. Save resources and spend your IT workers on logic and application quality improvement. Speed ​​up deployment. Connect infrastructure and application observability tools.

“Event-driven Ansible is definitely one of our interests. We have a lot of work in the space and we can identify them.” AIOps platforms like Dynatrace have issues, but the ability to combine Ansible and actually take action is a huge benefit.” said Tenaglia. “So we’re not waking up the sysadmin at 2am to fix the problem identified by Dynatrace. That’s replaced by a 2am phone call.”

According to CTS, Ansible has always been an automation platform initiated by individuals or workflows. “We weren’t addressing environmental issues within the organization. This changes things,” CTS’ Rose said. “So this provides a completely new environment for his Ansible automation to make sense within an organization. It’s more important than the sides.”

Red Hat Summit AI Innovation

At the Red Hat Summit in Boston this week, the company introduced new generative AI to Ansible Lightspeed using IBM Watson Code Assistant. Lightspeed promises more consistent, more accurate, and faster adoption of automation across your organization. Leverage natural language processing and integrate with Watson Code Assistant to access IBM Foundation Models built on Red Hat OpenShift.

Additionally, Red Hat has launched a new developer hub that enables partners to build world-class developer portals. The new developer hub offers a curated selection of tools, languages, and resources that promises better applications and less friction between environments like Kubernetes and Red Hat’s OpenShift.

Overall, Red Hat’s CEO said that becoming an open source market leader in the new era of AI will lead to great opportunities for partners.

“Partners will surround us in everything we do, all kinds of partners. This has been true since the days of Linux. Told. “Red Hat has done an excellent job of staying in our swimlane and allowing our partners to add value around it. They know their challenges, and we hope to help them get there faster.”