The Hindu Business Line : Red Hat eyes partnerships with Indian majors

The company is looking at partnerships with top Indian IT firms such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro coupled with collaborative efforts with the Government and educational sectors to push the adoption of Linux in the Indian market.

Addressing the media here, Mr Matthew Szulik, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Red Hat, said the visit to India was a preliminary step to increasing Red Hat's focus on the Indian market. As part of its long term approach for increasing Linux's presence in the domestic market, Red Hat India's existing employee base of 100 would be scaled up n the range of 250 to 700 in three years.

"We see opportunities to grow beyond this number as also we plan to make investments. The focus would be on development of Linux client including thin client and Linux desktops for the Indian market. Through our partnerships with IT companies here, we are looking to work on advance development, certification and expansion of core technology," Mr Szulik said.

While the Hindi version of Red Hat Linux operating environment will be rolled out shortly, the leading open source provider will focus on development of Linux client, desktop, browser, groupware and enterprise computing space. "This is the first step towards pushing technology advances in the Indian market. With the Government working on e-governance projects, we are keen to explore this area. Rebuilding the banking system is another good area to develop Linux applications. In fact many global banks are moving away from legacy systems to adopt open source for all the banking applications and this will happen here too," remarked Mr Szulik.

He welcomed the Indian Government's decision to lower taxes.

Other areas to explored for application development include education, transport, e-governance and banking.