Date:21/08/2004 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2004/08/21/stories/2004082102170700.htm

Back Red Hat plans development centre; bets on `localisation'

V. Rishi Kumar

Hyderabad , Aug. 20

RED Hat India, the Indian arm of Red Hat promoting the cause of Linux and open source products, has drawn up plans to set up its own Indian development-cum-support centre that would complement its "localisation drive". The Director and Country Manager of Red Hat India, Mr Javid Tapia, told Business Line that the company was in the process of finalising plans for its development-cum-support centre in India . It is expected to complement its Pune centre, which has now grown to about 50 people. This would be the company's fourth centre with other three located in the US, the UK and Australia respectively.

"The company has grown by about 100 per cent year on year in India over the last three years and with the growing adoption of Linux both in the enterprise market as also small office and home office (SOHO) segment, we now felt the need for a development centre. However, the details for this are still under way," Mr Tapia explained.

Mr Tapia, who was here as a part of a three-city Red Hat Linux drive covering Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai, explained that this event was aimed at meeting various segment users and gathering industry feedback about products and services. One of the objectives of these events is to popularise referencible projects in partnership with Oracle and Intel.

In India, the enterprise segment is showing faster rate of adoption in the server space and this augured well. Particularly, areas such as banking, financial and insurance services sector, manufacturing and eGovernance have taken to Linux in a big way. This is being steadily adopted by various State Governments and also in the education sector. Earlier, there were concerns about support for these products. But with large corporations such as Oracle, IBM, Intel among several others also supporting this drive, the market has changed, he said.

"However, the SOHO segment, which has great potential for our products and services, calls for special thrust. The requirements of such segment are quite diverse and this called for support from some other sectors such as the gaming industry. But with some of the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like Acer supporting this, we expect more action here too," he explained.