Red Hat announced the launch of its enhanced Partner Program, redesigned to give Red Hat’s business partners additional economic, sales, marketing and technical benefits through the introduction of a new partner level and solution specializations.

The Red Hat Partner Program will include a Premier Business Partner level in addition to Advanced and Ready classifications. The program will also feature Infrastructure, Middleware & Virtualization specializations.

“The reseller business around Red Hat is growing rapidly because customers are demanding trusted open source solutions to carve costs out of their datacenters, which is why we’ve enhanced our Partner Program to provide a deeper level of partner engagement,” said Roger Egan, vice president of North American Channel Sales. “Additionally we’ve increased benefits and built in specializations which will help our partners grow their open source practice. All of this reinforces our commitment and investment to our channel ecosystem.”

Partners continue to play a critical role in the overall success of Red Hat and the enhanced Partner Program will strengthen the investment and commitment to the entire partner ecosystem. Additionally, the redesigned program is intended to enable Red Hat’s partner community to collaborate and innovate to create complete solutions that solve customers’ IT challenges.

The redesigned program aims to serve all levels of partners and enable them to gain expertise within specific areas of the Red Hat product portfolio. The new Premier Business Partner level is intended to enable partners to deepen their strategic relationship with Red Hat through a number of sales-enablement and revenue-generating benefits; including, sales training, lead distribution, demand-generation campaigns, market development funds, joint customer win promotions and various technical support benefits.

In order to increase the reach of partners’ solution expertise, the Red Hat Partner Program will now also include three product specializations with the aim to help partners sell total solution sets to their customers.

The Infrastructure Specialization is intended for partners with proven expertise on Red Hat Infrastructure Solutions; including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Network Satellite, Red Hat Global File System, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat MRG. This specialization requires partners to maintain at least two Channel Sales Certified employees and one Red Hat Certified Technician.

The Middleware Specialization is intended for partners with proven middleware solution expertise on JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions; including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss BRMS, JBoss Operations Network, JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss SOA Platform and JBoss Data Services Platform. Partners with this specialization will have at least two Channel Middleware Sales Certified employees and one JBoss Administrator.

The Virtualization Specialization is for partners who have demonstrated expertise in Red Hat’s virtualization offerings at both the sales and technical level. This specialization requires partners to maintain two Channel Sales Certified employees and one Red Hat Certified Engineer with a focus on virtualization training.