‘Virtualisation is the way forward’
Companies are grappling with the challenge of doing more with their IT budgets in a competitive environment. Open source companies like Red Hat see a great opportunity in addressing that need with the help of technologies such as virtualisation. Red Hat’s president for the Asia Pacific/Japan region Gerry Messer says that the company’s approach is to educate and support its partners to make open source more mainstream. Excerpts of an interview.
What are the challenges companies face today in terms of IT infrastructure and what opportunities do they hold for open source firms like Red Hat?
For enterprises, large, mid-sized and small, the challenge is bridging the gap between their IT budgets and what they have to do in today’s competitive world. That gap is becoming bigger and bigger. Globally, open source leaders are coming in to bridge that gap. Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are coming out with much more technology.
Technologies like virtualisation, data management and middleware are all helping to bridge that gap.
Virtualisation is a great way to address the gap between demand and the IT infrastructure a company has. Every data centre is going to be virtualised going forward.
So, we have virtualisation technology embedded in RHEL as it offers a significant advantage if you have it integrated. By 2012, analysts have projected that about 80% of all commercial applications will have some component of open source.
What are the focus areas for Red Hat?
Our major initiatives are focused on JBoss in middleware. In the last six months, we have done a lot of integration. We have a new integrated service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform. We are in talks with entities from different industries — financial services, telecom and government — that are considering migrating to JBoss platform.
We are also talking to companies that want to use JBoss as a middleware platform for new applications. For instance, a major bank in Australia wants a new middleware for its new applications.
Then, a key focus area is initiatives to educate the customer and our service partners educated about our products and solutions. We have specific training programmes for our partners in India, Japan and Korea, perhaps one of our largest training networks covering 350 training institutes and over 120 partners.
To help our customers minimise the integration costs, we work with system integrators and consulting companies to leverage their support and skills.
Moreover, with Red Hat Exchange, the online martketplace for end-to-end solutions including applications, infrastructure and middleware, we work with partners and clients so that they understand what we have to offer, how they can deploy it and in case of clients, how they can benefit from the deployment. We have innovative business applications and solution partners. We offer everything in local language and the support is made available locally. It offers benefits of not only lower costs but also of flexibility. Organisations want to understand why and how they should move from one platform to another.
How is the Asia-Pacific and Japan region faring for Red Hat?
Asia-Pacific & Japan is fast growing for us. To support that dramatic growth, we are investing in building infrastructure and hiring people. In the last 9-10 months, we have opened new offices in Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan. We opened an R&D and engineering office in China earlier this year.
source : economictimes.indiatimes.com