WALKING THE OPEN SOURCE WAY
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Senior Vice President and General ManagerRed Hat, APJ and Neeraj Bhatia, Director - Partner, Alliances & Commercial Sales at Red Hat India talk about how organizations in India are embracing open-source solutions to thrive in the digital economy, the benefits of open source software vis-a-vis proprietary software and how Red Hat is hand-holding its customers in their cloud and digital journey. Excerpts:
Alot of customers are looking to work with you because you are offering open source products. What value do you bring to the table vis-a-vis the other providers in the market?
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen: Customers no longer want to pay for a product. They want to pay for the experience, for service, and for simpler access to technology. That’s what our business model has been. We give our customers access to the latest open source technology and that is worth the price they pay for. It’s a big world of open source solutions out there and picking the right one out of the many choices you have is extremely important. They also need to consider the future of the solution, the support, the compatibility and the portability. This is not something you can do without expertise and that is exactly our domain. So having the combination of our understanding about all the solutions and technologies along with the business model we offer, I believe we are in a very unique position and honestly, with very little competition.
How do you see the competition with proprietary vendors?
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen: I feel we are the competition to proprietary vendors now. The success of Linux and Middleware has really put open source on everyone’s agenda. We came in with Linux and made it the operating system across all hardware platforms which became a way for our customers to avoid lock-ins from hardware vendors and take advantage of new technologies at the same time. This was our early success. If you look at where we are now and the role we play in the cloud - it’s on a different level altogether. If you look at cloud providers that are out there- they all have their own proprietary solutions which inhibit customers to scaleup. We have created the operating system for the cloud with our OpenShift platform. Our customers now have an opportunity to develop cloud solutions in an agile way with the latest tools and run it in a very flexible way either on their own premises or on a public/hybrid cloud. They can also decide what is the most affordable option for them from a cost and performance point of view.
How do you see India vis-a-vis other markets?
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen: India is in a unique position, where the government is making clear requirements and recommendations for open source which is very helpful. We see the level of education on open source is very high in India and there is very little explaining we need to do. In other countries we tend to explain more in terms
of open source and how does it work. So yes, India is ahead of many places in terms of the awareness.
How do you see the Indian community contributing to the larger open source community?
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen: India is a very important contributor to many of the large open source projects. We can see the love for technology and open source very clearly here, and since it is freely accessible we see more and more people in India picking up on this.
How are the customers in India embracing open source solutions?
Neeraj Bhatia: The Indian government embraced open source long back. They are actually the early adopters and a lot of the citizen services which are offered through digital platforms such as Aadhaar, GST, railway bookings, and so forth, are based on open source technologies. We are the technology partner for the Government in several of these initiatives. So there has been a lot of positive reinforcement around open source to the Indian customers. We see this as a very good opportunity.
India’s Premier Stock Exchanges, BSE and NSE use Red Hat solutions. BSE became the fastest stock exchange in the world and NSE is the world’s only exchange which processes over a billion transactions every day- are totally running on open source architecture. Both of them are cutting-edge and they have seen 60-80 per cent savings in their total cost of ownership. They did not just stop at one project- as they continue their journey with us on the open source, they are continuously adding more innovations. They are moving the entire exchange onto the open source platform. What it does for them is one, it makes sure there are no lock-ins. Secondly, it saves them cost. The third and most important part is that they get access to innovation which they wouldn’t get in the proprietary world.
Can you take us through some interesting use cases in India?
Neeraj Bhatia: We are helping a lot of customers with innovation. For instance, one of our customers has implemented a containerized escrow solution. Escrow is a financial arrangement where a third party holds and regulates the payment of the funds required for two parties involved in a given transaction and the fund is released only when all of the terms of an agreement are met as overseen by the escrow company. This is largely all manual because a person has to confirm the receipt of the money. Hence, instead of creating a physical bank account, we have created a simple and secure containerized solution on our OpenShift platform. We attached all the necessary APIs to speak to various banks and automate the manual processes. We started with one bank and now three more banks have implemented the solution.
IT’S A BIG WORLD OF OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS OUT THERE AND PICKING THE RIGHT ONE OUT OF THE MANY CHOICES YOU HAVE IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. THEY ALSO NEED TO CONSIDER THE FUTURE OF THE SOLUTION, THE SUPPORT, THE COMPATIBILITY AND THE PORTABILITY. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN DO WITHOUT EXPERTISE