Open source vendor, Red Hat, is ramping up its education efforts to tackle a lack of understanding on how to adopt open source solutions.

Senior product marketing manager, Frank Feldmann, said the market was unfriendly and skeptical of smaller open source players.

"Startup open source companies just don't have the resources to get the message out by themselves. We need to be a mentor and look at developing programs to facilitate ways for startups to get their message out - and if it's good for open source it's good for Red Hat," Feldmann said.

One such initiative is Red Hat's Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI), which aims to make more open source solutions available to the market through partnerships with local software developers. It focuses on developing open source skills and provides resources and support to encourage an active open source community. The initiative is currently running in China and Singapore.

Feldmann said OSCI will expand across Asia-Pacific and into Australia. Further programs and initiatives for channel partners will also be announced at the Red Hat summit in June.

"We held a marketing update in mid-April concerning our plans for the next three to six months and we're now creating seminars to educate partners on how to take advantage of these," he said.

Red Hat has also recently appointed Bill Critch in the US to grow its JBoss channel programs.

These initiatives would flow through to the Australian market soon, Feldmann said.