Red Hat’s Prem Pavan: Partners must become ecosystem architects in the AI era

Red Hat’s strength lies in its ecosystem-first approach, making it a natural fit for partners looking to bring together diverse technologies and solutions for customers, Prem Pavan, Vice President, APAC Partner Ecosystem at Red Hat is making sure of that.

Prem Pavan was appointed Vice President, APAC Partner Ecosystem at Red Hat in April 2026. Having previously led Red Hat's business across Southeast Asia and Korea, Pavan now oversees the company's partner ecosystem strategy across Asia Pacific at a time when AI, hybrid cloud and virtualization are reshaping enterprise IT.

As enterprises scale AI adoption, partners are evolving beyond technology implementation to become strategic advisors. In a conversation with CRN Asia, Pavan shares his insights on the trends he is seeing in customers in the region as well as the opportunities for Red Hat’s partner ecosystem in APAC.

With Red Hat continuing to see strong growth and innovation in the open source community, Pravan shared that it’s never been a better time now than even before to be a Red Hat partner. Specifically, Pavan explained that Red Hat has democratized the whole context of the operating system over the years and now with the capabilities of AI.

For example, from a Linux perspective, Pavan shared that Red Hat took the open source innovation, made that enterprise ready, and took it to market, democratizing the whole concept of an operating system at that point in time. He added that about 15 years ago, it was the public cloud era where Red Hat believed that the world is not going to go completely public cloud and exit the whole data center on-prem world, nor are they going to just stay over here. It's going to be somewhere in between in the hybrid cloud .

“From a Red Hat perspective, it was the open hybrid cloud. So, democratizing the whole infrastructure space, the ability for people to be able to build out applications and deploy it anywhere, on-premise, or on the cloud, or on the edge, was democratizing that piece of it. And now our latest venture is to democratize AI. Because we have said, we are probably in a little bit of that space where we are not in the application space, creating these really fancy capabilities that AI is going to power. But what we are saying is that the workloads of AI is going to increase so significantly. It's going to blow out in terms of the workloads,” he explained.

Pavan highlighted that AI sucks up a lot of resources and is not a cheap entity. As such, Red Hat’s vision is all about democratizing AI.

“For us, it is any model, any accelerator, any cloud. So, we are saying that customers need to have the ability to use any kind of an LLM. They should be able to allocate their workloads across different types of hardware. It could be a CPU or a GPU and then they could deploy that application either on-premise, on the cloud, or on a device, on the edge, and so on and so forth. So we're very passionate about democratizing the whole AI piece,” he added.

At the same time, Pavan pointed that from a completely different perspective, Red Had has also done operating system, open hybrid cloud, automation, and more on its traditional platforms and will continue to be able to drive value to customers and partners through them.

Democratizing the open source platform

According to Pavan, there are a few key themes Red Hat wants to highlight in the platform play that it has have in the marketplace, besides the whole democratization piece.

First, it’s about the power of choice which Pavan believes is all about not having vendor lock-ins and such. He explained that in his observations, customers are looking at migrating from legacy virtualization workloads into other options.

“It's the power of choice. So, we are seeing a significant opportunity to be able to drive value in terms of migrating workloads from traditional legacy virtualization platforms into the Red Hat. We're seeing that as a definite big space where automation continues to be something that we are driving,” he said.

Another area is on digital sovereignty, whereby everyone wants be able to be in this globally connected world and get the best of innovation across multiple countries. But they also want to be able to isolate in some situations and be able to operate without any disruption.

“There's the whole digital sovereignty space. And then open source becomes that option for customers because they see that they are able to kind of continue to operate without use,” he said.

The next area is on trust. Pavan said that Red Hat has always the open source innovation and created the trust to enterprises that they can use this in a secure way.

“So, with great power comes great responsibility, right? So, AI is so powerful, but it also means that can be misused. Security postures, exposure is changing and is increasing significantly. So, we are now doubling down in our ability to be able to tell the customers, take the lead in terms of reassuring customers that we will be able to kind of counter these vulnerabilities that they might have from a security space. So this is another area that we have to watch out for,” Pavan explained.

The partner opportunities

Given the trends among customers, Pavan pointed out that there is a role for partners in every aspect. What makes the difference is in terms of how a specific partner operates with that customer or the particular market they are operating in.

“Traditionally, what partners did depend on the nature of their offerings. For example, an ISV would have applications while an IHV would have hardware, and an MSP would be offering managed services. The fundamental thing was they had an offering, service or a product that they are bringing and selling that or taking that to market.”

“Now, the role of partners is becoming what I would call an ecosystem architect. And I've seen this over the past few years already. When you talk to a hardware partner, it is no longer just talking about a server. They're talking about an AI factory, for example, you're taking some software, you're putting the GPU into that and you're taking an offering to that. You take any type of a partner over here, they are basically bringing together multiple different technologies irrespective of what they are. So to me, that's the role that partners play,” he explained.

For Pavan, Red Hat becomes very relevant in the partner conversation because they already bring a very strong ecosystem into the mix of things which is in the Red Had DNA.

“When we decided to start looking into AI and democratizing AI, we started working with a lot of different partners, alliances, the who's who in the industry to be able to take our offerings to the mix over here. I think at the core of all these capabilities to be able to drive these solutions. When you talk of digital sovereignty, it's not just that Red Hat is going to be able to solve that problem, but we bring a complete ecosystem to be able to solve those issues. That's where the partner comes into play,” he added .

Put simply, Pavan believes that partners are basically evolving with times as well as its not just Red Hat driving the change.

“Partners themselves are evolving and adapting to the change. From our perspective, it's not just a technology change, it's about operational as well. The first things that we are seeing from a value perspective, is the value creation perspective, value propagation, and a value consumption,” Pavan explained.

For Pavan, this is part of the overall strategy in which Red Hat is working with its partners. From a value creation perspective, he said Red Hat has been traditionally very strong to be able to work with partners.

“For example, If you're in Malaysia, then you work with partners to be able to go together, to be able to drive value to our customers. By and large, Australia, it's a similar thing and so on. So traditionally very strong in that, that will continue. Because that's something that we've traditionally been very strong. I think value creation goes to the next step which is to be able to drive solutions together and go to market over here,” he said.

What this means is the capability to drive, implement and execute something that has been typically driven globally from the headquarters to become more regional and local.

“Wo we are working with ISVs, IHVs, GSIs, with the system integrators, managed services to work together, to be able to create a solution and go to market together to be able to drive that to truly become a value multiplier. We've got our sales teams who are already driving a lot of these different capabilities, but we are trying to make these partner driven. So, there's a value creation piece where we are looking at co-creating solutions and going together to market,” Pavan explained.

When it comes to value propagation, its all about monetizing opportunities together. From his three decades of experience in the channel, Pavan explained that the technology organizations that have been successful working with ecosystems are the ones that are not completely consumed by their own success.

“We obviously want to be able to drive value for Red Hat, but we want to make it easier for our partners to operate with us by removing the friction and the barriers to operate with us, to be focused on their success, on their value propositions,” he said.

On the consumption, Pavan said its all about how Red Hat and its partners take all of this and drive value to the customers who are consuming what’s being created for them.

“That is where we now are focusing a little bit more part of this overall strategy is to create what we call specialized partners. It's not just about creating great solutions; customers care about execution of those solutions. But having specialized partners who focus on being able to kind of, creating those skill sets within organizations to be able to deliver and to add on to those skill sets on organizations is key. This is so that wherever they need capabilities that come in from us to ensure that customers are successful post-sale from a support standpoint, looking at people that we can put into partner organizations to support our customers better and so on and so forth,” he added.

With Red Hat focused on making it easier for partners to operate with them, Pavan also shared that Red Hat has re-looked at its whole incentive programs to make it more profitable for partners to engage with them.

“So we've made some fairly significant number of changes entering into this year, and we'll see those results hopefully into the latter part of this year. But yes, the ultimate focus is to be able to drive better business opportunities for our partners. And based on that scale, to be able to kind of give them some benefits based on that, have different types of commercial models with them, depending upon the nature of the model. For example, for an MSP model, it could be a consumption-based model that could be there that we would like to take to the customer and so on and so forth. So different commercial models and also incentives,” he explained.

Ultimately, Pavan believes its all about providing the best success which is adoption of the technology by the customer. As such, these are primarily the key areas where Red Hat is working very closely with its partners in driving the scale of adoption for customers.

Being a successful partner

While Red Hat has got many successful partners in the region, Pavan highlighted that a lot of these partners are mainly the local system integrators and the distribution network that the vendor has in most of the markets that it operates in.

“We've got a very strong established space across any of the countries and regions in APAC and this space continues to be something very strong that we work in terms of most of our solutions going out there to the customer. For example in Malaysia, it is important to be able to work with local partners who understand the culture, understand the business. We work through all of those mechanisms to grow,” Pavan said.

At the same time, Pavan pointed out that the next two areas that Red Hat has seen significant growth in the last two years is in the space of leveraging hyperscalers and hardware manufacturers.

“Typically, if you think about it, when a hyperscaler is selling capacity to their customers, then there's a RHEL that is attached as part of that. So it's a classic OEM business that we call the hardware vendors and the attached business with the cloud partners. What is changing now is more sophisticated capabilities. It could be hybrid cloud, it could be virtualization, or it could be AI, that we are trying to package through these particular solutions and take to market. For example, we have NVIDIA, Red Hat, Linux, Dell combined together like an AI factory that we are taking to market together. So I'm very bullish about what we're going to do in this space,” Pavan explained.

Interestingly, what has also been emerging is the managed services space, especially with digital sovereignty becoming more and more critical in this as a demand.

“So, I'm seeing fair amount of growth of managed services across markets, but I would say that so far, we've been seeing, Japan has been a big space there, Australia, India as well, we've been seeing growth. So, it's quite a few of these countries where we're seeing a significant growth in the space of managed services but for different use cases though in each of these spaces,” he said.

Success in the region

With Pavan having a solid strategy in place to lead Red Hat’s partner ecosystem in the APAC region, a key message that he would like to convey to partners is that Red Hat brings a certain humility into the opportunity, into the market and into the demand.

“When I joined Red Hat, right, we're an organization of a certain size. Which means that there are many organizations that are much bigger than us, and there are many organizations that are much smaller than us. What I've seen Red Hat do really well is we understand how to operate with organizations that are much bigger than us, and also the smallest of organizations where we see value and the ability to be able to think.”

“So, the first thing for us and for me, is to make sure partners understand is that as long as we're able to drive value to the end customer, working together, going to market together, and if that opportunity is there, then we bring in a certain honest, sincere commitment towards that cause. The second aspect of it is we are looking at the customer life cycle and not necessarily short-term outcomes. If you look at most of the relationships we have in Asia-Pacific, they're very long-term relationships that we tend to have with our customers,” he said.

As such, Pavan wants partners to know what Red Hat is looking at the long-term play and that any partner who's willing to look at that long-term play as well, the vendor will bring them into the mix as well.