Red Hat Arms Channel Partners With Renewals Intelligence Platform

Red Hat, an open-source solutions company, is providing its distributors and resellers with a digital platform to deliver daily-updated data on renewal performance and exclusive Red Hat sales insights.

A component Red Hat’s Partner Renewals Engagement Program (PREP), the Renewals Intelligence platform features a suite of interactive dashboards that allows channel partners to gain a more complete picture of their Red Hat renewals business.

Especially useful for account managers, sales and marketing teams at distributor, reseller and solution provider companies, Renewals Intelligence equips partners with actionable insights that can help contribute to revenue growth, improved customer experience and new business opportunities.

“Everything’s virtual, there are no face-to-face meetings,” said Andrew Joiner, Senior Director, Global Renewals, at Red Hat. “Calls are shorter and every call is critical. So you need the right data at the right time to make a lasting impression and to help your customer succeed. That’s our goal, delivering the right information at the right time to help partners achieve all nurture and growth outcomes.”

The new Renewals Intelligence offering enables partners to navigate daily-updated data and insights through an intuitive design with interactive charts and filters. By exporting more than 70 data elements and data at the SKU-level, the platform will enable partners to:

• Review and understand their Red Hat renewal performance relative to competitors, goals and incentive targets;
• See how renewal opportunities have transferred in and out of their portfolio; and
• View, filter and prioritize upcoming Red Hat renewals and access key contacts to help drive growth.

Data from external sources in being used to ensure partners “have the right contact information, that they know who they’re talking to or who they should be talking to,” said Joiner.

Red Hat said it plans to continue adding features and capabilities to Renewals Intelligence for partners. For example, InfraRed is an upcoming feature designed to enable distributors and resellers to uncover deeper insights with predictive intelligence. The InfraRed feature will offer sales predictions based on a series of machine-learning models developed by Red Hat’s data science teams.

InfraRed will help partners understand “what a customer might be interested in, so here are some things to do to have that conversation,” said Joiner. It will help partners determine if there are customer needs that they need to be better equipped to address. “They can start to invest in that training if they see opportunities that will help them expand their footprint with the customer.”

Partner response to the Renewals Engagement Program has been “very positive. From our pilot to our launch, we’ve seen a really strong uptick in the number of partners. Now, the big effort is making sure they understand the tool, because there’s always the learning curve. But what we found is that, as we’ve worked to train and evangelize and help everyone understand what they can do with this tool, we’re seeing huge shifts in consumption on a daily basis.”