The Hindu Business Line : Open opportunity

In India, IDC expects the Linux server market to grow by 22.8 per cent between 2006 and 2011, and in Asia-Pacific around 21.6 per cent in the same period.

What are the challenges and trends in this segment?

Increased collaboration between open source communities, government and enterprises will take place as more realise the benefits of open source.

I do also expect more software vendors to embrace open source as they tap the potential of accelerated innovation in the development of more competitive products.

Open source adoption in the enterprise will continue to increase, especially in the application infrastructure space.

That will be fuelled by an increasing number of open source solutions that will be made available to businesses as open source developer communities further proliferate.

One of the biggest challenges for open source will be the need to make the availability of open source skills more pervasive, increase the awareness and understanding of the model.

How has open source been a key driver of IT implementation in business, across verticals and industries?

From a business perspective, open source technology allows CIOs to address the critical factors of any IT implementation.

These include risk mitigation, cost reduction, maintaining control over all aspects of their IT infrastructure and operations, as well as freedom from vendor lock-in and the ability to access relevant innovation.

One aspect of risk mitigation is the much higher quality of open source technology. According to Coverity, in 2004, the Linux kernel source code reported 893 defects for every 5.7 million lines of code. Comparatively, proprietary software reported about 1,14,000 defects for the same amount of code.

The high quality of open source technology that comes about as a result of its inherent openness has given the likes of NYSE Euronext the confidence to move their trading platform from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

From Red Hat’s perspective, the most receptive verticals are financial services/insurance, telecom companies, education and government, and that has certainly helped our business in India expand over the past five years.

Some of our customers who have contributed to our growth include LIC, Axis Bank, Airtel, Reliance Communications, Government of India’s e-governance initiatives, for instance, eCourts - Supreme Court of India, Sarv Siksha Abhiyan - Ministry of HRD, E-post - Department of Post, National e-governance Service Delivery Gateway – CDAC, Mumbai, and APTDC Online Reservation System, among others.

Red Hat has introduced new initiatives such as Embedded LinuxHypervisor, Virtual Infrastructure Management and Security Infrastructure. What are the benefits for organisations implementing these?

When we talk to customers who have deployed our virtualisation technology, the key benefit that comes across is that they’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars deploying Red Hat virtualisation instead of proprietary products.

They’ve been able to deploy virtualisation on new workloads that previously couldn’t be virtualised due to performance limitations, such as databases and ERP systems.

Finally , it’s the simplicity of an integrated solution: ‘it just works!’

savitharin@gmail.com

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