India as a market was never so interesting as it is today. Courtesy Make in India, Digital India, Smart City and GST initiatives, the infrastructure modernization is the priority for all government, PSUs and vertical markets. This offers ample opportunity to the technology vendors to position their solutions.
The domestic infrastructure market growth has certainly given opportunity to the technology vendors to make their solutions available to the larger audience – be it government, PSUs, manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality, retail and a lot many vertical industries. But a trend quickly emerging is that the ICT infrastructure market is becoming more software driven at the core. It means the CXOs are making themselves ready for the future transitions and adaptability. They might be looking at VDI today but in a few months’ time they would definitely look up to embracing mobility or adopt BI and Analytics applications or some other management applications. So if the core is software defined with software defined storage and networking, they can easily adopt the new application. So in their pursuit of excellent solution, often they face up with situations where they need to decide on embracing Proprietary Software or Open Source. Because once the investment is made and they are locked in it is irrevocable. If they would like to make any change in their software choice they would certainly have to change their entire fabric because the language would be different, the database would be different, the plugins would be difference. So the cost of switching would be too high for any organization to justify.
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“We have seen public sector banks, which had implemented core banking solution on Risk Unix platform about a year ago, have now implemented same solution on x86 Red Hat platform.”
Rajesh Rege
Managing Director
Red Hat
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As per Rajesh Rege, Managing Director, Red Hat, Open Source solution and Red Hat should be the choice of corporate India or govt. of India and PSUs India reason being we are a growing economy and all of our enterprises are on high growth momentum. And, only Open Source solution can put their software destiny in their own hands and this can enable their growth too. He further said, “Open Source solution is a community developed product vis-à-vis the proprietary solution, which is developed by a bunch of people in a closed door environment. It means the speed of innovation is much more in the case of Open Source.”
“I am very bullish about Open Source adoption for India. As India opportunity is beginning to unfold in front of us, there are very many initiatives under way. Given the size, scale and complexity of India, those initiatives can be brought to fruition only on a foundation of technology. That is where Open Source piece plays a big part because you need to have your software destiny in your own hands. You need to build size and scale and work around the challenges you have in India,” he added.
The power of collaboration and the power of participation accelerates innovation. And, that is recognized by government and enterprises alike. As a result of which, Red Hat solutions and other Open Source communities have been appreciated and embedded in the IT infrastructure of Govt. banks, telecom providers, oil and gas sectors. Pretty much, every sector of economy that are using the technology, are increasingly deploying Open Source solution. Earlier there used to be incorrect assumption about Open Source but today there are number of use cases in every sector. Rajesh maintains, “The biggest example is the BSE, which uses Open Source for their entire trading environment. Every body’s requirement is ‘Mission Critical’ but I would like to believe that a bank or a stock exchange is much more mission critical than the regular customers. And for BSE, to completely build their entire trading engine on Red Hat speaks very powerfully for the scalability and reliability that Open Source offers. Almost all fortune 500 companies globally have Open Source and Red Hat implementation. In India as well, there are many companies which are referenceable.”
India is a focused market for Red Hat globally. Therefore, India houses some of the critical assets of the company. For example, Red Hat engineering team is based out of Pune and Bangalore. The company has an important leg of follow the sun support locations in Pune, which is third apart from the one in US and other in Australia. In addition to that a number of its back office processes are also available in Pune.
India is a vibrant market from the perspective of community development. Innovation happens if there is a large community coming up with interesting solutions for solving business. Red Hat works very closely with various educational institutes and various developer communities to build and foster Open Source in India.
Gone are the days when government used to be the only Open Source friendly organization. Today, around the globe and in India too, Open Source is being embraced widely by all sectors in the economy.
Red Hat success in the Indian soil is not only for its capability to innovation quickly but also its capability to reach out to the customers. Rajesh says, “Red Hat has a very robust partner ecosystem. It has a very reach portfolio of solutions whether it is in the conventional areas across different industry segments or upcoming areas like cloud and virtualization. We have also a rich portfolio of partners. All the OEMs including Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. are our partners. They have a genesis of working in customer’s complex areas of operations since ages and offered very robust and scalable solution. These partners understand the relevance of Open Source and most specifically Red Hat and its portfolio. We have very strong engagement to address the need of the market place.”
Red Hat has a very broad portfolio which spans from the OS to Virtualization, Middleware, Software Defined Storage (SDS) and cloud technology, etc. He maintained, “So, to that extent, we have a diversified portfolio. All of these solutions are interlinked to enable us to present a big picture for a bigger solution like Open Hybrid Cloud.”
Red Hat’s virtual offering is very much accepted by a number of customers. From the capability perspective, it is a massively scale out hypervisor with some of the world record bench marks. It is platform agnostic.
The addressability of Red Hat solutions is quite impressive as in five minutes it can be deployed in production. Today, the new generation of startups are embracing Open Source. But not all startups have strong and deep technology knowledge so they need organization like Red Hat.
Rajesh said, “Open Source is mainstream now. We have seen public sector banks, which had implemented core banking solution on Risk Unix platform about a year ago, have now implemented same solution on x86 Red Hat platform.”
Finally…
Rajesh concluded, “Already we have a good partner base. We are working with Ingram Micro aggressively. One of our initiatives is geographic expansion as to how we can create impact in tier-2-3 cities. How we can make large impact on the neighboring countries – Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc.”
At the global level, 68% of its revenue comes from the partners and the company spends much time in onboarding and acquiring new solution providers and ISVs.
