Case Study | Red Hat | Pronto | Ecosystem management platform

Case Study

How Red Hat increased partner pipeline by 5x

May 10, 2023

min

Red Hat is known for having an ecosystem-first mentality. So it was eye-opening how much more insight they could get into their relationships by adopting Pronto for their strategic alliances and SI partners, and as a result, uncovered $30 million worth of partner opportunities.

Challenge 1

Partner Managers spent countless hours manually entering, exporting, and reconciling data to report on partner performance every week.

Eliminated 100% of manual work through Pronto's automated workflows and reporting, saving each Partner Manager an average of 10 hours per week.

Challenge 2

There was no streamlined way to collaboratively develop solutions with partners and know where to focus to maximize ROI.

Pronto surfaced data that helped the team identify and prioritize 3x more high potential joint solutions. Project management features simplified the GTM process.

Challenge 3

Lacked real-time visibility into partner pipeline and couldn't easily measure partnership value or the ROI of co-marketing activities.

Constant, shared pipeline visibility led to exceeding quarterly revenue target for partner-enabled deals by 135%. The impact of co-marketing became easily quantifiable.

Scaling GTM partnerships was challenging

Red Hat is a leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions. Partners are central to Red Hat’s success, with their expansive partner ecosystem of over 2,200 partners driving more than 70% of their revenue. Together with partners, Red Hat brings innovative products to market that offer reliable, flexible solutions for customers worldwide.

When Red Hat began talking to Pronto in 2020, they were grappling with managing and scaling go-to-market (GTM) partnerships. The PRM tool they hoped would solve this turned out to be hard to deploy, use, and maintain. Red Hat was still facing challenges around tracking pipeline, market development funds (MDF), and co-marketing ROI. Staying up-to-date on solutions being developed with system integrator (SI) partners was challenging. And it was hard to verify who the top performing partners were.

Red Hat determined Pronto's platform would be a good fit for two of their divisions: Red Hat Global and Red Hat Cloud. Each division has its own set of partnerships and goals. For Pronto, the focus was:

Red Hat Global: Co-selling with ISV tech alliances
Red Hat Cloud: Developing solutions and GTM strategies with SI partners

Keep a comprehensive list of all partner solutions in Pronto

Assign and manage tasks related to solution development to your teammates and partners

No items found.

Going live and boosting pipeline 5x with Pronto

Red Hat Cloud

After a successful proof-of-value, Pronto was rolled out to all 15 of Red Hat’s North American cloud provider partners. Regular training sessions helped get everyone up to speed, and once they started working together on Pronto, a shift occurred. By August 2021, Red Hat was using Pronto to track the entire partner lifecycle, from the start of working with a partner all the way through closing a deal.

"With Pronto, we're now enabling our partner sellers like never before, winning more deals, and getting a holistic view of our ecosystem performance."

Jeff Clawson

Director, North American Service Providers, Red Hat

A big proponent of co-innovation, Red Hat often works closely with 2+ different partners to produce one solution. Having a centralized system to collaborate and share data within Red Hat’s firewall has proven useful for developing solutions within multi-variate relationships.

After implementing Pronto, Red Hat was able to closely manage the GTM process for 23 new solutions in tandem with SI partners. They’ve also been able to identify 3x more high potential joint solutions by being able to surface better insights about how solutions are performing in different industries and geographies. This is usually difficult to do when working with multiple partners and solutions, especially when partners use different naming conventions. GTM has accelerated as a result.

Red Hat Global

Co-selling and re-selling with ISV partners took off as well. Within 90 days of deploying Pronto, Red Hat Global was more easily able to identify new accounts and saw their net new pipeline increase by 5 times. Since then, they’ve exceeded their quarterly revenue target for partner-enabled deals by 135%.

Partners are sharing and collaborating on new deals with Red Hat, more aligned than before. Plus, reporting on performance has become instantaneous, saving an estimated 72 hours of work per week. It’s now possible to accurately measure revenue contribution by partner, helping uncover high potential partners. Likewise, it’s simple to measure the ROI of partner marketing campaigns.

“One benefit of Pronto is being able to track the ROI of marketing campaigns that require investment from us and our partners. We have all that data in one place in Pronto, and we know exactly how effective every campaign is that we're executing, which is very valuable information.” 

– Jeff Itscovitch, Alliance Manager, Red Hat

Part of the reason for this joint sales success is because they’ve moved to a model where they don’t simply hand over leads to partners, but instead empower partners to create their own opportunities while still staying connected with Red Hat’s sales teams and resources. The idea is to expand access to a broader set of customers and opportunities. Equipping partners with the resources and materials to enable sales has been simple with the document repository feature within Pronto.

What’s Next:

Soon, Red Hat will be using Pronto to collaborate with distributors and strategic partners. While working with Pronto, Red Hat Global and Red Hat Cloud have found new ways that they can collaborate with each other to generate even more value from partnerships.

Together, Red Hat and Pronto are helping bring their forward-thinking Strategic Alliances, ISV, and GSI partners together to create innovative solutions on a global scale.

Red Hat

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