Red Hat has launched its enhanced Partner Program, redesigned to provide the company’s business partners with additional economic, sales, marketing and technical benefits through the introduction of a new partner level specialisation.

The company claimed that 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 and virtualisation specialisations.

The redesigned program is intended to enable Red Hat’s partner community to collaborate and innovate to create products that solve customers’ IT challenges.

The new program is also intended to enable partners to develop their strategic relationship with the company through 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, the company said.

The Partner Program will reportedly include three product specialisations with the aim to help partners sell total product sets to their customers. The three specialisations include: infrastructure specialisation; middleware specialisation; and virtualisation specialisation.

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