McLaren said these technologies, and the company's increased relations with its customers, has enabled its evolution and financial development of 30 to 40 per cent per year.
"The primary destination to go to today in terms of trying to get to Cloud is to virtualise effectively and to start figuring how you can manage with the same infrastructure, your private as well as public Cloud capability," he said.
He said it comes off the back of more organisations finding the need to store stuff efficiently and cost effectively.
McLaren added that for partners, there needed to be services attached to the offerings to get it up and running.
He said the days of customers looking for partners to be fulfilment arms had disappeared. This has been replaced by the need for trusted advisors.
As such, he advised partners to take on the role of being trusted advisors to their customers, maintaining and tightening relations with them.
Red Hat has also been actively increasing its involvement with the channel as it aims to move its business focus predominantly to the channel.
In addition to its distributor partnerships with Avnet and Ingram Micro, the company most recently with CingleVue.
McLaren said it is open to the proposition for more partners.
"Channel-led has an opportunity. We're putting in place enablement programs and promotional ideas to recruit channel partners and to provide them with the ability to drive more business for them and for us," McLaren said.
The company evolution has broadened the company to focus on verticals beyond what it did (IT, finance, banking, telco and government) to others such as retail, wholesale, distribution, utilities and education, he said.
"We've moved from the traditional industrial age -- from the information age to the information economy. Information assets are becoming more important for organisations than physical assets. It's creating new organisations that are driving the destination of the productive world," he added.