Red Hat has opened a dedicated online resource for its partners around the globe, giving them access to the product, program, pricing and training information on both Red Hat and JBoss solutions and services from one single location which is localized in the Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish languages.

"We worked closely with our business partners from around the world during the development of the Red Hat Partner Center. Our partners made it clear that they wanted a central partner repository, an easy and seamless way to work with Red Hat, language localization, a single global agreement and access to information to help develop new business and manage existing business" said Mark Enzweiler, Vice President of North American Channel Sales at Red Hat.

This looks like being just the start of a process of change at Red Hat which should be good for the Linux industry as a whole. It flags a positive effort to become not only a channel-friendly company but a channel-driven one, and the partner portal is the strongest display of evidence yet. Of course, there was a previous partner website for Red Hat resellers but it hardly inspired confidence in the company or helped people in the business of selling Linux to actually sell it. The statistics show that during the last quarter alone in North America, channels sales accounted for more than half of all Red Hat sales.

"In the past seven years, we have seen Red Hat commit to and invest in the success of the channel, especially in government" said Christine Schaefer, Director of Marketing at DLT Solutions, Inc., Red Hat's largest government reseller "the new Red Hat Partner Center is just another example of that commitment and rivals some of the best partner portals we have seen in the industry."

It is a demonstration that Linux is maturing in the marketplace, as it must, in an attempt to become a professional alternative to the OS mainstream.