Red Hat to ramp up headcount

Red Hat India, which employs over 1,000 people in India, is looking to ramp up its engineering, sales & marketing and consulting headcount on the back of growing demand for its open source software services and support, which is driven by BFSI, government and telecom verticals.

India revenues grew more than double the rate of Red Hat Inc, which posted revenue of $629 million in the fourth quarter and total revenue of $2.4 billion, up 18 per cent YoY for the full fiscal year ended February 28, 2017.

“FY2017 has been a good year for us. Currently, we seek talent in software development, sales & marketing and consulting across Red Hat locations in India.

“We have signed up a new 60,500 sq ft facility that can seat 400 people on Outer Ring Road, Bengaluru where our engineering team will work out of, in September, when it is ready. We have moved into a larger 14,000 sq ft office in Bengaluru’s city centre earlier this month, that can accommodate 75 people and will also house our training and enablement centre for customers and partners,” Rajesh Rege, Managing Director, Red Hat India, told BusinessLine .

Of its 1,000 plus employees, 900 are engineering, shared services and global support staff. Asked how many would be hired this fiscal, he said “We are still in the process of determining the number. India is the largest operations in Red Hat Asia Pacific and I see hiring happening throughout the year.” Last year, the company had ramped up its India headcount by 40 per cent from January– September.

Stating that the company’s geo-expansion strategy initiated last fiscal would continue this year, Rege said, “There is scope to grow our business outside of the top 6 markets of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata. This year, the focus is on the next 25 cities including State Capitals where we are looking to tap smart city deals and smaller cities such as Indore, Amritsar, Kanpur, Coimbatore, Vishakapatnam and Nashik, where IT infrastructure is being set up.”

Since open-source software is free for everyone to use, Red Hat’s revenue model is dependent on subscription-based sales of the support and services that it offers to its customer base.

For fiscal 2017, subscription revenue contributed to 89 per cent of the company’s global revenue.

“Our goal is to work very closely with the top 250 enterprise and public sector customers and their ecosystem to make sure that Red Hat technologies are onboarded by them in their digital transformation journey,” said Rege.

James Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat Inc, has said that India is one of the key growth engines to help achieve the company’s revenue goal of $5 billion by 2021.

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