Red Hat has brought in some big-blue muscle power in a strategy to expand and consolidate its worldwide channel.

The Linux distro on Wednesday named 25-year IBM veteran Mark Enzweiler as vice president for North American channel sales. Enzweiler recently served as vice president of global channel strategy and sales for Lenovo, IBM's former PC business.

Enzweiler assumes power at an important time for Red Hat. Known mostly as a Linux-boxed-with-hardware operation, Red Hat's channel is being offered new opportunities around JBoss middleware.

The Red Hat Application Stack, launched last month, is Red Hat's first offering for its 500 channel partners that incorporates JBoss. Enzweiler says a "greenfield opportunity" exists for partners moving from a proprietary to an open source software business. The channel currently accounts for 60 per cent of Red Hat's revenues. ®