Beginning with just a small office and a staff of eight IT engineers a few years ago, enterprise software developer and provider of open source solutions, Red Hat, now has its second-biggest R&D centre at Pune and has just set up another centre in Bangalore to meet the upward spiral in growth. Huned Contractor interviews the company's global support services' head to know more.

As the man in charge of global support services at Red Hat, Marco Bill-Peter travels across the world. Among the many countries he visits, India is quite high in terms of priority for the simple reason that this is one market that has been contributing a rapidly increasing share towards Red Hat's global revenues. The world's leading provider of open source solutions with its headquarters in the US, Red Hat provides enterprise-strength, mission critical, software, and services in information technology's most important areas such as operating systems, storage, middleware, virtualization, and cloud environments that help companies reduce costs, and improve performance, reliability, and security.

Founded in 1993, its India centre began functioning about nine years ago from a small office in Pune. The Pune R&D unit, with an employee count of 300 engineers, is now the largest engineering centre of excellence outside of North America. Red Hat has added another engineering centre of excellence in Bangalore, following the acquisition of Gluster, now known as Red Hat Storage. During his recent visit to Pune, Marco, who has two decades' experience in information technology and support delivery and has earlier worked with HP, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corporation, took time off for an interview to elaborate about what is prompting Red Hat take such big strides ahead. Excerpts:

For a lay person, it is quite difficult to understand how open source software and its paraphernalia contribute to cost savings and efficiency. So could you elaborate with a case study?

Out of the many projects, let us choose that of Carnation Auto. This is an initiative of the former managing director and CEO of Maruti Suzuki, Jagdish Khattar, and is an automotive service and sales entity with a chain of hubs across India that offers car maintenance; insurance; CNG/LPG retrofitment; body and paint; accessories; and car customization, among others. The challenge was to set up a centralised IT system that would function as a single window to address the various needs of owners of multiple stakeholders such as customers, business partners, workshops, sales outlets, regional offices, and the headquarters.

As such, Tata Consultancy Services leveraged its automotive industry expertise to design, deploy, and manage a solution based on SAP Business Suite on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with integrated virtualization running on HP ProLiant servers. This has helped Carnation Auto gather information on customers, sales, and budgets while achieving a highly cost-effective and secure system on open standards that scales and performs to meet the increasing demands of the business with enhanced process efficiencies which lead to more rapid access to business intelligence. The head office now gets a 360 degree view of the business and on the operating side it can take quick and informed decisions about various issues, such as ordering of spare parts or providing timely information to customers about servicing, etc.

How does India fit into Red Hat's global outlook?

First, you have to understand our business model. Red Hat offers open source solutions and this software is free. Therefore, the business comes from consultancy, setting up operating systems, and subscriptions. The subscription price covers things like technology, maintenance, upgrades, code change, and 24x7 customer support. In that sense, the growing economy of India and the need of business organisations to match global competitive standards have provided Red Hat the opportunity to expand its customer base. Though we do not disclose exact figures, let me tell you that India's contribution to our first quarter revenues of USD 363 million has been quite high. Our subscription revenue has gone up by 16 per cent year-on-year.

In fact, in a larger context, the share of the Asia-Pacific region has been impressive and since November 2011 Red Hat has ramped up activities for the developer community across APAC. This territory now accounts for approximately one-quarter of Red Hat's Product & Technology Group employees worldwide. We now have four R&D centres across APAC at Brisbane, Beijing, Bangalore, and Pune. We have also been focusing on networking with both professionals and students. For example, we hosted the world's biggest Fedora Users and Developers Conference at Pune in 2011 in collaboration with the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP). In early 2012 we hosted India's first JBoss User and Developers Conference at Bangalore.

What have been this year's operational highlights?

We have established the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, focused on building a robust ecosystem around the Red Hat OpenStack distribution and cloud infrastructure technologies. For those not in the know, OpenStack is a cloud computing project to provide an infrastructure as a service. It is free open source software and the technology consists of a series of inter-related projects that control pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data centre, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering its users to provision resources through a web interface.

We have also added Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat JBoss A-MQ to enterprise middleware portfolio. These products are designed to enhance Red Hat's enterprise integration and message capabilities. We are also proud of the fact that Red Hat has been named to CRN's 2013 Partner Program Guide and awarded five-star partner rating. This is in recognition of providing the best partnering elements in various channel programs. Further, we were ranked the fourth most innovative company in Forbes magazine's list of the world's most innovative companies.

What are the emerging areas in India that Red Hat is concentrating on?

There is bio-technology that is quite a prime sector coupled with pharmaceuticals and automotive. In the last one year or so we have had several projects from the media and entertainment industry and Hungama is one of our recent clients. At the same time, e-commerce continues to be our major contributor to business. We are also doing well in providing platforms for the mobile telephony and gaming sectors.

Could you name some of your customers?

On the global scale, we have Accenture Software, Cornell University, Dreamworks Animation, Emirates Group, IBM, Marriott International, and others while in the APAC region our key customers include Allianz, Bharti Airtel, China Life Insurance, Indonesia Stock Exchange, Just Dial, Nissan Motors, SK Telecom, etc.

So what's the future strategy for India?

The talent count in India will be scaled up. For example, we have 300 engineers working in Pune right now and it's quite possible that this figure may go up to about 400 over the year.

(Contact: Red Hat, Tower 10, Level 1, Magarpatta City, Pune 411 028. Tel.: 020-30467000.)