Red Hat to open ODC in China

NEW DELHI: Close on the heels of raising around $ 600 million, Red Hat — the Linux provider is all set to increase its focus in the Indian sub-continent on various fronts. "We have just raised about $ 600 million and now we are looking forward to making sure that this money is invested properly to increase our presence and penetration. Within India we would be investing our efforts in the education sector and also working closely with the government to partner with them in various areas," informed Matthew Szulik, Chairman, CEO and President of Red Hat Inc.

As part of its increased focus within India, the company would be hiring close to 200 software professionals over a period of three years. "At present we have a team of about 90 professionals. We will increase it by another 200 people within 36 months. The recruiting process has already started and we are looking for people for our support, development and marketing expansions," he added.

Though the company has not divulged its details about the investment plans, it has, however outlined areas such as storage and virtualization as two most addressed areas in the near future. "This is my first visit to India, and I certainly believe that India has a lot of potential for us and the market. We would be focussing on areas such as SAN and how it can be useful on verticals like healthcare and education. We would also be emphasizing on virtualization and development of open source based file systems," he explained.

Citing the lack of GPL (general public license) format for major hardware manufacturers as a roadblock for the company and its growing user community, Matthew said that the company is looking forward to working closely with worldwide chip manufacturers and hardware vendors to increase the number of GPL based products in the market.

"We know that there are a lot of users who feel difficulty when it comes to finding right drivers for Linux and we are going to address this issue. The whole industry needs to understand that now we need to move away from an aging client server approach, to a more open distributed computing environment. World heavyweights such as Dell and IBM can make a lot of difference if they address this properly," he added.

Accepting the fact that China together with India symbolizes one of the most lucrative markets in the worldwide scenario, he said that the company plans to open a software development facility in China. "The Chinese government has been very pro-active when it comes to Linux. They have said publicly that all the public applications for government will be done in an open source environment. We are quite open to having a development facility over there," he added.

CyberMedia News Service