We have a partner on the East Coast we've worked with for three years. Reseller, strong engineering bench, deep in regulated industries. We've driven real revenue together. Their team knows exactly which of our people to call, and our team knows what a serious opportunity from them looks like before we open the email.
That relationship works. It works because we built it the slow way, deal by deal, and because a handful of people on both sides carry it. Which is also its limit. Everything good about it lives in those people, and when their pipeline tripled this year, the honest question wasn't whether we could support it. We did. The question was how we give every partner that same experience without a phone call being the thing that makes it happen.
Trust doesn't scale on its own. Enablement does. That's what the CIQ partner portal is, and it's live today at portal.ciq.com/partner.
Why now
Customers are standing up AI and HPC (high-performance computing) infrastructure on timelines that would have been unthinkable two years ago. AI has widened the security conversation from patch cadence to provenance. Compliance requirements keep arriving, with software bills of materials moving into contract language and defense supply chain rules tightening. Legacy upstream Enterprise Linux estates are reaching end of life on their own schedule, and plenty of Enterprise Linux renewals have drifted to where the spend drastically outweighs the value.
All of it lands on the same teams, inside the same 24 hours. Speed has become a selection criterion. When a customer asks what RLC Pro AI runs for forty nodes and whether the deal is yours to work on, the partner who answers in the meeting is the partner who gets the business.
Register a deal and hold the protection
Registration lives behind the partner login. Every submission gets a unique registration ID and a protection end date, and it attaches to the correct end customer account the moment you submit. You record the end customer, the products and SKUs, quantity, term start and end, deal value and expected close date, plus deployment type and cloud provider.
When you bring us a deal, you get evidence that it's yours and a date you can hold us to.
'My Registrations' is your own ledger: registration ID, end customer, date submitted, approval status, protection end date, deal value. Click any row for line items and terms. A partner rep sees their own registrations, an organization admin sees every registration across the organization, and nobody has to email me to find out where something stands.
Quote, send, and sign without waiting
The portal carries our commercial SKUs with descriptions and single-node list prices, alongside public list pricing consistent with ciq.com/pricing. It's enough to build a credible quote while you're still in front of the customer. For partner-specific pricing, talk to your CIQ contact. A static page doesn't replace that conversation, and the deals where it makes a difference are worth a phone call anyway.
Solution briefs and partner enablement videos are available the moment you sign in. No form, no request to a partner manager.
What you can sell today
Three recent moves widened what you can take to a customer.
RLC Pro now includes CIQ Enterprise Linux Manager. ELM went generally available on August 6 and comes with every RLC Pro subscription, with no separate purchase. It gives operators a control plane for their Enterprise Linux fleet: mirror content onto their own infrastructure, curate it into signed and versioned content views, see dependency conflicts and CVE exposure before a rollout, promote through staging into production, and roll back to a prior version. It runs in the customer's own environment and is air-gap capable, including fully disconnected sites. For any customer making a lifecycle tooling decision this year, that's a strong reason to look at RLC Pro, and it costs them nothing on top of the subscription.
There's a real free on-ramp. RLC+, our free Rocky Linux distribution, is available the moment someone creates a portal account, and developer licenses for RLC Pro and RLC Pro AI let a team evaluate at no cost. Since August 18, customers can buy CIQ commercial products directly in the portal with a credit card, which gives you a clean path for smaller accounts worth cultivating that don't warrant a procurement cycle.
The larger deals sit in the rest of the portfolio. Start with the customer's next deadline and work backward.
- RLC Pro AI ships the complete NVIDIA stack pre-validated, for teams moving fast on AI infrastructure.
- Fuzzball is a turnkey path to sovereign AI, with production-ready inference on infrastructure the customer owns and controls, orchestrating AI and HPC workloads across on-premises and cloud from a single control plane.
- RLC Pro Hardened is the first and only Enterprise Linux distribution to ship runtime kernel exploitation detection enabled and supported by default, alongside FIPS 140-3 validated cryptography, which is what federal, defense, and regulated buyers ask for by name.
- Warewulf Pro provisions HPC clusters, and Apptainer, still the container standard in HPC, is included with it.
- Ascender Pro handles enterprise automation and is licensed separately from RLC Pro.
Solution briefs for all of these are in the portal. If you're building on CIQ products, C3 is where certified builds belong, and there's a direct prompt in the portal to submit them, alongside links to the main CIQ portal, our documentation, and ciq.com.
How access works
Two steps, and it's worth being precise about them.
First, your organization requests access and gets approved. On first sign-in, you can reach RLC+ and the solution briefs, and resellers also get deal registration.
Second, access to the full CIQ product portfolio requires either a signed general account access agreement, or a distribution or reseller agreement. If you're unsure which applies to you, email ciqpartner@ciq.com.
Go use it
Already a partner? Sign in at portal.ciq.com/partner and register your first deal. Then tell me what you want in the portal next, because this is a starting point.
Not a partner yet? Apply at ciq.com/partners/become-a-partner. If your customers are having the AI infrastructure conversation, the compliance conversation, or the renewal conversation where the spend has drifted past the value, we should talk.
Three years of trust with one partner taught us what good looks like. The portal is how we give it to everyone.
