Open source has truly democratized technology. Red Hat is one of the world’s leading open source companies, creating innovative technologies for more than two decades now.

Analytics India Magazine sat down with Neeraj Bhatia, Senior Director of Sales, Red Hat India / South Asia to learn more about the open source ecosystem and Red Hat’s role in it. “Digital transformation remains essential to gain competitive advantage,” he said.

Excerpts:

GOAL: How does open source development lead to better technology?

Neeraj Bhatia: CIOs and the most forward-thinking organizations today understand that success in the digital age requires companies to maintain a constant innovation dynamic instead of innovating on an ad hoc basis – but to come up with ideas, developing and testing innovation is not essential for every business. More so, companies have realized that there is not much they can do on their own. In today’s digital economy, there is a need to combine efforts to support growth and agility, i.e. open collaboration for open innovation.

Open source software is developed in a decentralized and collaborative manner, relying on peer review and community production. The open source community is much bigger and faster to innovate than any single vendor. It’s the driving force behind much of the technological innovation that we see – all of the key tech mega-trends like blockchain, AI, machine learning are happening because every member of the open community source, through its contribution, helps define the future of technology.

Over the past few years, we’ve also seen how the open source approach to problem solving has continued to expand beyond the tech world to help tackle some of our society’s most difficult issues. As a result, more and more organizations in all industries, from automobiles to banking to consumer products, are now contributing, distributing and using open source software within their business and product portfolio.

Neeraj Bhatia: We believe that using an open development model helps create more stable, secure and innovative technologies. As the largest open source company in the world, we have worked for over 27 years to invest in open projects and technologies, protect and defend open source intellectual property, and recruit developers who are actively involved in open projects across the board. of the computer stack. We start with open source, community-built software that meets the needs, partially or fully, of our customers. Red Hat builds on these projects, strengthens security, fixes vulnerabilities, and adds new business functionality. We then make those improvements to the original project for the benefit of the community as a whole.

GOAL: How is Red Hat helping organizations innovate and transform?

Neeraj Bhatia: As always, our goal remains to work with our clients to enable their growth and help them survive and prosper. Red Hat is now well positioned to support businesses and governments that have a forward-looking plan to serve their customers wherever they are in their digital transformation efforts – by modernizing their existing applications. , their IT architecture and infrastructure or by innovating with new business models and applications to get the best of what hybrid cloud and containerization have to offer.

Our collaboration with open source communities has helped us bring various innovations to market with products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Data Services, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS and more. In today’s environment, where many of our customers and their developers work from home, tools such as Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces (native Kubernetes collaborative development solution) enable rapid development of cloud applications that provide a cohesive development environment, secure and without configuration. .

For organizations looking to make the most of existing resources and use technology to extend operations to remote or distributed teams, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a scalable and reliable foundation for these efforts. Meanwhile, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers extensive automation capabilities, allowing IT teams with limited manpower to keep services operational. On the other hand, companies whose services are in demand must evolve. These IT teams need to effectively link existing critical systems and applications to cloud native services. Red Hat OpenShift provides a standardized platform across the IT landscape; Whether it’s an on-premises or hybrid cloud, regardless of its underlying hardware or service provider, allowing IT teams to conserve existing resources while moving workloads for scalability, safety or speed.

AIM: What do you recommend for organizations moving to the cloud?

Neeraj Bhatia: An ideal cloud ecosystem must follow open standards and tools to harness the full potential of hybrid and multicloud. Applications must be able to move from one environment to another, have consistent security policies, and automate and manage resources. To harness the full potential of the hybrid cloud strategy, companies must build their hybrid cloud on open standards and tools.

For example, developers need a platform that allows them to design and deploy applications that meet the business needs of today and tomorrow, regardless of the underlying hardware or cloud architectures. This should give them the freedom and flexibility to choose from the ever-growing palette of development tools such as programming languages, databases, and web servers, to build and test their applications, regardless of where it is. ‘infrastructure.

Red Hat’s cloud portfolio provides businesses with the ability to build a complete and consistent cloud infrastructure compatible with a variety of technologies and topologies. Regardless of the cloud service provider or the need to create a cloud that serves everyone from developers to business application owners, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud solutions deliver cost-effective interoperability across the cloud continuum without vendor lock-in.

OBJECTIVE: Tell us about Red Hat’s role in the development of 5G open infrastructure

Neeraj Bhatia: To stay relevant in the ever-changing market landscape, telecommunications service providers must become more agile to take advantage of the capabilities of 5G networks, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, web ‘machine learning, etc.

Open Telco is the foundation of modern telco. It refers to the use of open source solutions to foster flexible platforms that provide a solid foundation for the 5G architecture so that carriers can bring new services to market with greater scalability, security and efficiency. Red Hat advocates choosing the right technology and associated architecture to lay the foundation for any transformation initiative. In the telecom context, we have seen the same thing emerge in the NFV where telecom operators aspiring to be digital service providers have chosen Red Hat to build their open hybrid Telco cloud which is ubiquitous in nature and can universally run. all network workloads. , IT and well positioned to integrate emerging applications and use cases such as 5G, AR / VR, Edge Computing and IoT

With this in mind, we work closely with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Using IBM and Red Hat’s portfolio of hybrid cloud and cognitive enterprise capabilities, Airtel has adopted an open cloud architecture that uses the Red Hat OpenStack platform for all network workloads and Red Hat OpenShift for newer containerized workloads. And for Vodafone Idea, we have enabled its IT and network applications to run on a common cloud architecture. With the deployment of our Open Universal Hybrid Cloud, the company will position itself to play an important role in the future deployment of new technologies.

AIM: What are Red Hat’s future plans, especially in India?

Neeraj Bhatia: The pandemic has further accelerated digital transformation and created a landscape that will continue to encourage technology adoption at a very rapid pace. With this in mind, organizations across industries are embracing hybrid cloud, automation, integration, and development methodologies such as cloud native application development.

We’re well positioned to support businesses and governments wherever they are in their digital transformation efforts, whether customers are modernizing their existing application architecture and infrastructure, or innovating with new business models and applications. In fact, we see a tremendous opportunity for us to accelerate and further fuel the digital journey in India. We are also increasingly focusing on mid and small to mid-sized businesses to help them effectively go digital.

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