Our Bureau

Pune , Feb. 7

RED Hat has inaugurated its global engineering and support centre here on Monday.

The India support centre would address the support requirements of the growing domestic customer base while serving the customers in the English speaking markets globally, according to Mr Matthew Szulik, Chief Executive Officer, Red Hat.

Talking to presspersons, Mr Mathew said the investment for the centre was less than $3 million (Rs 12 crore) and has a contingent of 30 people. The facility can house up to 150 software professionals.

Red Hat now has three support centres — North America, the UK and Australia — addressing support requirements of local customers in North America, Europe and Asia.

Mr Javed Tapia, Director, India operations, noted that the support centre is its long-term commitment to the Indian market while pointing out that the choice of Pune was it being the next Silicon Valley.

Mr Matthew said the centre would also house a test laboratory for hardware and software certification. He noted that the software and hardware certification programme ensured inter-operability on Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of products.

Mr Matthew said the support centre would also house a Linux Centre of Excellence, which would look at the certification process and act as the base for the engineering activities.

It would also have a localisation team that would work on localisation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Indian languages. At present, five Indian languages, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati and Punjabi, catered to this.

Looking at the revenue generation, Mr Matthew said that the international business contributed to about 40 per cent of its total turnover.

He, however, noted that in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan led the race followed by India in terms of revenue.

"However, in terms of growth, India was far ahead," he said.

He added that though India was growing fast, it was not looking at the Pune centre as a revenue generation unit.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu Business Line