With 25 years at the forefront of Open Source software, Red Hat is celebrating a quarter of a century at the cutting edge of technology. With a business model radically different to your typical software vendor, we spoke to Adrian Pickering, Regional General Manager for Middle East and North Africa for Red Hat, to discuss how the company has operated successfully in such a competitive market for so long.
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions and has built up its reputation utilising a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualisation technologies.
As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT.
Here we talk to Adrian Pickering, regional GM for Red Hat for the Middle East and North Africa, about the company’s past, present and future.
How has the industry changed over the last 25 years?
25 years is a long time in technology. Back in the day when I was getting into the industry everything was proprietary operating systems. Then we moved into the age of where Unix operating systems started to come on the market. Then we had the client sever revolution and here we are today. From a Red Hat perspective there is an increasing acceptance of open source-based software in the market. I think that is another evolution of the market. It’s interesting to see how networking is being impacted by open-source software and software defined networking which is really starting to get some traction now.
In terms of Red Hat what does open source mean?
The fundamental difference with open source technologies or software is that it is developed by community contributions to a particular project – so anyone, a student or a developer in a company somewhere, can actually contribute their efforts to an open source project. At any given time there are thousands of open source projects which are in development. Individuals form a community and try to solve a particular problem. It is a community development as compared to a proprietary development.
What Red Hat does as the world’s leader in open source solutions are a number of things. So first of all, in terms of the Red Hat employee base, which is about 10,000 people worldwide, we have our own population of developers who work with communities and community projects. What we do is we provide constructive feedback and contributions to the community project so the software that is being developed is relevant and appropriate for the market place.
That’s one of the things that Red Hat does but I think the most fundamental component of Red Hat’s contribution to open source is we take the open source software and we put it through a variety of processes.
For example, we will certify and test open source software in multiple different environments. We have a laboratory environment where we can test software on the different components and certify it as being stable, bug free, secure and so on so that an enterprise can put that into their environment with confidence to run their business applications.
We document the products and provide 24/7/365 support for that particular open source technology. It is quite a different business model compared to your typical software vendor in the marketplace.
How has cloud computing opened up opportunities for Red Hat?
It definitely has. What we are seeing from a Red Hat perspective is that organisations definitely want to be able to leverage the cloud. From the Red Hat perspective, certainly at an enterprise level we are seeing the world become very much a hybrid cloud environment. What that means is an added degree of complexity.
We do have a number of different solutions that enable an enterprise, public sector (organisation) or even a telco to manage that hybrid cloud environment, again available in open-source technology but fully supported on a subscription basis from Red Hat.
One of our core missions from a Red Hat perspective is to be the world’s leading provider of open source hybrid cloud solutions. That is something that we are going to actively pursue as we go forward.
How have your customers changed over the last 25 years?
I think there has been a considerable evolution. First of all there is the breadth of what is available from an open source perspective. The diversification of customers has come as a result. Even today people say ‘oh Red Hat, you are the guys who do Linux.’
As Linux has gained traction it has given customers the confidence to look at the different forms of open source software which is available. Customers are now looking at things like open source middleware, to link up their different business applications, and they have looked at open source software to deliver effective solutions.
Many enterprises are looking at what they do with the cloud, as companies look at modernising their applications, all of these areas are available in open source solutions. What we have seen over the last probably three years is an acceleration of adoption of these solutions. We have seen that acceleration increasing as confidence in open source increases.
According to industry analyst firm IDC, non-traditional developers are expected to build 20% of business applications and 30% of new application features by 2021. Why is this?
As awareness of community development ramps up you will see greater momentum with open source platforms. There is increasing awareness of customer adoption, whether they are public or private sector.
When I travel around my region I am often asked to visit colleges and universities who have traditionally run training courses around Microsoft. We are being asked ‘what can you do to help us set up a curriculum around open source technologies?’
There is a similar sort of ask coming from the customers that we work with. We are finding there is a demand from banking institutions, for example, to become more agile and innovate at a much faster pace. As more and more people become educated and trained you are going to see an acceleration.
How does Red Hat’s Open Culture promote innovation?
One of the key mantras that is continually articulated is continuing to maintain the culture of Red Hat. The culture of Red Hat is about openness so we have all these projects where we have multiple contributors so we are encouraged to challenge the norm about how a product is developed, how we market, how we develop our partner programmes.
We are encouraged, in a structured way, to feel free to voice our opinion for employees to have an open dialogue. The interesting thing about open source software development is it is a meritocracy. If you have an idea on a bit of code that you think is a good addition to the Linux operating system, it is discussed and evaluated by the community who are developing that particular product. It’s refreshing to be in that environment.
What are the advantages of Open Source Technology compared to Proprietary Software Technology?
Given the nature of the community-based development what we experience is a level of innovation ahead of that of a proprietary based development path. Proprietary software vendors release new versions of software primarily to suit themselves.
The development of software from an open source environment runs ahead of a proprietary environment so innovation is really there. If we look at this from a commercial perspective you can download a variety of different open source software solutions with the reassurance that you have got support if you come to an organisation like Red Hat through subscription.
We are not the guardians of intellectual property, we release the code once we have been through it and it is available for anyone to use. What we provide is a subscription and the subscription provides you with the confidence of the certification etc. As a commercial model what we are finding is this is much more cost effective because this is an annual subscription so you are not having to buy a license and then have to buy support. You literally download the software and you’ve got all the support.
Back to my part of the world which is a territory which is primarily oil dependent. We’ve gone through the decline of oil prices and where we have seen expenditure decline because of budget constraints we have actually benefitted.
We can go to a customer and say ‘Do you actually want to be paying hundreds of thousands in licence fees and then pay for support on top of that or would you rather look at an innovative option where you simply buy a subscription to support that infrastructure and reduce your on-going OPEX’. As the confidence in open source increases then we are seeing more and more organisations, such as big gas companies and ministries, moving in this direction.
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