Red Hat India eyes server segment

Priya k Mathew

Red Hat India, a joint venture between Red Hat Inc. and Clover Technologies, is eyeing the new server market in India to capture 50% of the market by this year-end. Red Hat Inc., the market leader in Linux server software with 65 per cent market share worldwide, has a 60 per cent stake in Red Hat India while the Indian partner Clover Technologies holds the rest.

Set up in November 2000 and becoming fully operational in January 2001, Red Hat India has been marketing its brand of Linux, Red Hat Linux in the Indian sub continent and is providing support and service to Linux users here. In a telephonic chat, Red Hat India, director, Javed Tapia talked about the growth of Linux and its potential in India.

How big is Linux in India?

The Linux market is divided into the server segment, predominantly for the enterprises and the desktop segment, which has not yet been penetrated by Linux in a big way.

India has been quite in the forefront among the countries adopting Linux. It sure has a tremendous back-end presence in India, more in the data centers, ISPs and mail servers. But it has not moved into business applications and mission critical applications.

What are the bottlenecks in the growth of Linux in India?

I would say it has got something to do with the lack of an organized commercial company in India who could provide the support and service to Linux run applications. Now that Red Hat has set up an office in India, we can address local issues at the local level itself.

What are the opportunities that you see in India?

We are eyeing the new server segment and are expecting to capture 50 per cent of it by the end of this year. For that, we are working closely with hardware vendors. We have relationships already in place with OEMs such as IBM and Zenith.

With the PC penetration going up in India, Linux has a market here ready to be tapped. Linux offers 3 distinct advantages for the Indian scenario such as: it works on low-end hardware, it is cost effective and for the first time user, there is no pain of migrating to a new operating system. Moreover, GUI in regional languages is available with Linux.

How does India compare with other Asia Pacific countries in the adoption of Red Hat Linux?

Well, the Asian Pacific countries have their own favorites. While Red Hat Linux is strong in Australia, Turbo Linux is strong in Japan. Chinese have their version of Linux called Red Flag Linux. But Red Hat is the market leader worldwide and I have no reason to believe that it doesn't hold good for India too.