OK folks, let me take this one at a time. The conversation was NOT
misrepresented at all. They got my name from two people. The first person
was the Florida sales rep, Chris Burnette (919-754-3700 x44152) who I had a
nice conversation with. I was asking him about the possibility of selling
Red Hat Support to my larger customers. I sell support contracts from my
other partners products (hardware and software, and the customers ask for it,
so I thought a complete package would be nice. He said "sure, but we won't
pay you anything...we don't use a channel." Then he said he'd have the
Hardware Partnership rep call me...and he did, which is where all of this
came from. The second person who talked to me about needing to speak with
the Partnership guy is the education rep, who I also had a nice conversation
with. Her name is Emily Ball, but she is leaving the company and has nothing
to do with this.
This guy (not Chris, but someone else who I'll need to get the name of)
proceeded to tell me that I can not, in any way, shape or form, put Red Hat
on anything I sell...PERIOD, unless I have the expressed written consent of
Red Hat. If I want that I need to pay them in excess of 20K to become and
OEM partner so they can certify my boxes with their product. Without that,
the ONLY way to do this is to remove ALL mention of Red Hat from the product,
and give the customer ,in the words of Red Hat "A totally stripped-down
version." I was told that even if I don't charge for this, I am making money
on the box, and thus am making money off of Red Hat. He also told me Red Hat
is going after a different business model, which involves their Advanced
Server line. The boxed sets or the downloaded copies are less than 1% of
their revenue.
My point to them was this (since Bill Preece brought it up):
1. Red Hat has a new K-12 program for schools. They said "Yes we do, but
that is for customers working DIRECTLY with Red Hat. Again, they said they
have NO INTEREST, let me say this again, they have NO INTEREST in working
with partners. I told them this was a private school...they didn't seem to
care one way or another.
2. I am not making any money off of Red Hat. They said, "Yes you are...you
are selling a product, and putting our product on there as well." (I'm still
figuring this out).
3. I am helping them by pushing their product. They said, "Doesn't
matter...we're only interested in selling the Advanced Server, and we ONLY
sell direct to the end-user...no channel."
4. I have seen other very large companies I have worked with in the past get
killed trying to do business this way. They said, "We believe we'll do just
fine."
5. When I mentioned that other distros, I was told "Put all the SuSE,
Mandrake, Debian and whatever else you want on your systems. They are
loosing 15 million dollars a year. They are all going to be bankrupt and
gone because the business practices they have. We don't do business like
that." My reply, "If I had a dollar every time I heard one company tell me
the other was going under, I'd be rich."
Let me wrap it up with this...I let everyone know this because there was a
thread on here a few weeks ago about how some thought Red Hat was going the
way of Microsoft. This just confirms it. The very fact that they want their
name out there, but do NOT work with channel partners proves it. The fact
that I can not pre-load Red Hat on my system unless it it Advanced Server.
I find the fact that Red Hat is becoming so arrogant about their name that
they won't let me respond to my customer's SPECIFIC REQUEST absolutely ,
especially when I don't charge a dime, not one penny, to do this.
I find the fact that Red Hat will only work directly with end-users and not at
all with channel partners very Microsoft-ish. Except that Microsoft has OEM
agreements that you can sign up for. They understand how to do business.
I also take offense to being called a troll, a liar and being told I have no
in what I said. I have NO INTEREST in misreprenting Red Hat, my conversation
with them, or anything else. I have 7.3 loaded on three of my own
systems...that is until I repplace it with something else. I think they make
a heck of a product, and my customers like it very much. But I can't, for
the life of me, understand why they are being so about this. To me, it
comes down to acting like Microsoft when they say "We know we'll burn bridges
(an exact comment from the buy I spoke with) but that's OK."
As for the "arrogant clown" comment, I apologize...that is what the flu, and
two kids with the flu will do to you. I'll try not to take comments from
people like R P Herrold personally.
Thanks,
Dave
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 20:41:30 EDT