The importance of being open
REGE tells Raghu Krishnan how it makes sense for young professionals to live near their places of work and yet why he built his hideaway in faraway Coonoor
Rajesh Rege has a privilege that few chief executives of technology companies have in Bengaluru: the luxury of walking to office.
Since he moved to the country’s tech hub 17 years ago to join Sun Microsystems, which then was as hot as today’s Google, Rege has stayed at an apartment in the tony Richmond Town in the city centre. The office of Red Hat India, where he is managing director, is a 10-minute walk from his home, which on most days is faster than reaching by car and battling two traffic signals in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Our plan was to meet for lunch at K&K at the ITC Gardenia, a luxury hotel that has come up in what was once the sprawling residential quarters for senior executives of ITC in Bengaluru. It helps that the hotel is walking distance for both of us. It is a Monday morning and we are early for K&K. So we settle at Cubbon Pavilion, the other round-theclock sky-lit restaurant of the Gardenia named after the iconic lung space of the city that is two roads away.
Rege has returned from Coonoor, where he recently completed the housewarming ceremony for his new home in the Nilgiris or blue mountains. Coonoor is unlike its popular and crowded cousin Ooty. The hill station — a few miles down from Ooty where the heritage train that runs on a metre-gauge track halts for its final stop in the hills — is less crowded. It still has space for people with reasonable wealth to buy plots to build their homes amidst greenery. Rege’s has been three years in the works.
“Hills are a great place to live. There aren’t many places (on the hills) where you can buy (a plot). In today’s day and age, nobody can be certain on whether they will retire. We felt it is a nice piece of land, good investment and let us build something,” says Rege. We initially discuss whether to take the buffet and finally ask for the menu card. Rege chooses a mushroom soup while I opt for the one which offers a combination of barley and mushroom.
The last Coonoor trip also has restored his faith in humanity. On his return trip, his iPhone slipped on the ground when he was getting into the car. He realised that his smartphone — his crucial link with colleagues and family — was lost, looked at the Apple feature to find lost devices, when he got a call on his wife’s phone from his number. A local gentleman had picked up the phone that had fallen on the grass and called them. Relieved they headed back around 10 kilometres up the hill to the location. “When I met the guy, he says, ‘I don’t want anything’,” says a surprised Rege.
The Sholapur, Maharashtra, -born Rege, who did his engineering at REC (now NIT) Surathkal in Karnataka, was a reluctant migrant to Bengaluru. So was his wife Sheetal Iyer, then a journalist with Femina in Mumbai. Only after his marriage with Iyer did Rege realise that in some vegetarian homes food is cooked even without garlic and onion.
The lure of working with Sun Microsystems made him choose the city. The first advice he got from his then boss Bhaskar Pramanik was to take a home near office. Rege shifted. Iyer went on to become a popular radio jockey and joined the erstwhile WorldSpace Radio team to start Timbre Media that offers customised music on office campuses and institutions.
After Sun was acquired by Oracle, Rege felt that he might not fit in and moved to Cisco, which was aggressively expanding in India. “Sun was very entrepreneurial and like family,” he says, adding he is trying to bring that culture at Red Hat.
Rege has taken to heart the first advice he got. He passes the same to new colleagues who join him in the city: choose a house near the workplace. That is also an effort to build and maintain an open office culture as he engages with young engineers and salespeople. “We believe in being open in more ways than one. Employees are free to share their opinions and constructive ideas without any worry of hierarchy,” he says, adding that the company’s internal mailing list is very active with these voices. “It is a great culture that helps organisations attract and retain people rather than a great pay packet. Culture is what we bring everyday to our people,” Rege adds.
Red Hat has built a business model of using open source software, making it enterprise grade and providing after-sales support to customers the same way large software companies do. “In the early days, what you had was okay for you for that day and for the next several years. You drove the change and the market would adapt. Now, new things are coming up to disrupt you. Changes are happening so fast that radically different things are completely disrupting industries,” says Rege. “That is where open source comes into play.” In open source software, multiple individuals contribute in building the code with the ecosystem playing a major role in identifying bugs and fixing them. “It is the true power of network effect,” says Rege, as he orders a kid’s portion of a chicken roll. I am comfortable with the soup. Rege talks about the open source community’s role in playing a regulator that backs the better ideas and eases weaker ones through a natural weeding exercise. “It is a selection of the best and fittest,” he says. In India, its two big successes have been the underlying platform to power Aadhaar, the unique identity programme, and National Stock Exchange, which runs on the Red Hat platform. “Open source is an idea whose time has come. The need for speed and agility among organisations has made them look at systems that are open so that they don’t get locked,” says Rege, acknowledging that the challenge is to get more enterprises to move from existing platforms to open source. “People recognise the advantages. But to move away from a comfortable situation and shift to something new is not going to happen overnight. People are taking measured steps.” The waiter brings two rolls and Rege says one would be enough. It is a kid’s meal, the waiter politely reminds, but the soup is heavy and the waiter removes the other half for takeaway. Rege appreciates the fact that many of today’s fledgling firms are looking to build solutions outside conventional areas and scouting for opportunities in emerging areas like artificial intelligence, analytics and cloud. He sees a huge opportunity in start-ups. India’s start-up explosion is an opportunity for large global technology companies to tap them young. They offer software and hardware products often free or at dirt cheap rates so that they adopt at an early stage. The start-ups also are the natural users of open source software. Rege says as they grow their businesses, these start-ups would help in building reliability and security and become its long-term customers.
Red Hat has built a business model of using open source software, making it enterprise grade and providing aftersales support to customers the same way large software companies do