"India's technically qualified talent pool makes it a strategic market "

Szulik has been leading early-stage technology companies, such as Interleaf, MapInfo, and Red Hat, into global, publicly traded firms for more than 20 years now. Today, Red Hat is the leading provider of Linux and open source technology to the enterprise and is positioned to be the defining technology company of the 21st century. Szulik is passionate about improving the educational opportunities for students worldwide through open source.

During his recent visit to India, he spoke to Rahul Gupta of CyberMedia News about various Linux initiatives he has taken on desktop and enterprise front in India and worldwide.






On future of Desktop Linux in India...

There's a lot happening on the desktop Linux initiative. We have developed thousands of application on it and application availability will continue to grow. The recent tie-up with 'Tally' is a perfect example of it. We are working with other software developers as well and are targeting educational and government segment initially for desktop growth.





Competition has been there for 12 years, so there's no change in that. The only difference is the benefits that open source development model is being able to generate i.e. providing better and secure solutions at the lowest price to customers. We have developed multiple computing architecture, seven-degree computing architecture and better security on Linux platform. These are some things based on which open source is posing threat to Microsoft's dominance in desktop segment. Worldwide we have around three percent market share in desktop Linux market, but we are growing at a faster pace.





Linux desktops offer a lower business value at a higher TCO...

I don't think so. If it was so, then companies like Amazon, Yahoo and Wall Street investment banker wouldn't have migrated to open source. This is all Microsoft's marketing gimmick. The initial cost of purchase people may want to compare with Windows is for application availability. The TCO of computing mediums like hardware, software, system reliability, system management, configuration management for CIO using Linux anywhere in the world is comparatively much cheaper on Linux than Windows. I personally feel that in 2008 Linux would have 34 percent market share in all Intel server shipments. There are around 50 companies that are developing applications on Linux in India and by next year I expect it would be much more.






Linux in the server space

Well applications are written in 'C' language and customers are moving to x86 architecture now. It is a very simple migration. So the cost of hardware is moving towards low cost Intel x86 server and that is the key reason why customers are moving towards Intel or Linux. Second reason is high performance availability of applications that are three times faster than proprietary Solaris and the third reason is the growing application market.






On competitors like Sun, IBM and Novell

We will continue to compete successfully with all these vendors. Initially, will do with customer reference. Customers are now increasingly migrating away from Sun over x86 machines. We need to educate our customers in government and education sector about Linux. We are providing very strong support based technically qualified people to help them. Sun says that Solaris is cheaper than Red Hat but then Sun said many things in last two and half years but I don't think it would be able to win our customers. We have customer success in all the verticals we are targeting and would continue to do so.






On the Netscape acquisition

We are working hard to build open source architecture in enterprise market. The key component of that is having strong security solution. So, Netscape acquisition brings host of feature like encryption, identification and management that will allow us to help both Linux client communication as well as server implementation. We have already started selling Netscape products as part of our enterprise initiative. Storage and virtualization is also an important part of our enterprise initiative and we expect major chunk of our revenues would continue to come from enterprise offerings.





On the Indian market for Red Hat

India market is very important for us I have been here twice in 11 months. We will continue to accelerate our investments in India. India's technically qualified talent pool makes it a very strategic market for us. Worldwide industry is moving here and domestic, US and European customers are building competency over here and we would like to implement our solutions here on the ground locally. The opening up of support center in Pune is just a start as far as investment in India is concerned. We will expand more service relationships.