Director, Sales
Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd
Red Hat remains the sole example of a pure play open source organisation, matching the revenue generated by even modest-sized proprietary alternatives, Hitesh Sahijwala, Director, Sales, Red Hat india Pvt. Ltd, talks to Elets News Network (ENN) about the company’s plans
What are the various end solutions for banking sector in India, Red Hat deals with?
Red Hat is one of the largest open source organisations. If you look at our global reach, we are a 2 billion dollar company in terms of revenue, having presence across the world.
The philosophy of Red Hat is very clear. We are catalysts in the community of customers, partners and contributors to develop technologies which are State of the Art in the open source space. We harness the power of community to develop technology. I see Red Hat to be one of the leaders of the enterprises to open source segment.
Are Indian banks willing to open source technologies against the proprietorship of softwares?
Across the industry, the acceptance for Red Hat as an enterprise open source vendor or a partner is very high. Today, Red Hat is not a part of one of the peripheral organisations partnering with the customers. It’s part of the enterprise ecosystem. Whether customers are running their core banking or running their own organisation systems, or running their CRM or customers like Bombay Stock Exchange, the volume of the trade has been phenomenally high. The performance is 100 times better than the proprietary system which they were getting earlier.
Do you think there is still scope for open-end source systems?
There is a lot of scope, if you look at the Banking and Finance sector. It is the largest adapter of this technology. Look at the government whether it is UID or my gov, they are all adopting open source. UID is running on RedHat platform. I do see very good adoption primarily because we are no more playing on a platform layer. We are providing technology the middle way which helps integrating your disparate systems which were traditionally there. We also provide advance web services to integrate the advance channels to a customer environment.
What are the advantages of using open source technologies?
The main advantage is that you get far more enhancements in technologies, more expertise, better knowledge transfer that is why you are far more closer to the customer in terms of development. Speed to deploy is far more better and turnaround time is also far better. Because in proprietorship system you will be struggling within the four walls. But here you can open into a community that will help you in fixing bugs.
The performance of open source is 100 times better than the proprietary system which they were getting earlier
Do you require special kind of skill sets to handle these open source solutions?
The standard operating environment is one of the other USPs of open source and that’s what a lot of organisations want. If you look at the standardisation, process of development, process of maintenance are making seamless progress and this helps you in making things far more agile and adaptable.
Apart from Bombay Stock Exchange, what are the other clients you are catering to?
We have lot of clients like Barclays Bank, Deutsche Bank who are using our open source technologies.
Is it more secure than the proprietor?
Yes, definitely. And this is what we are covering up. The security layer is far more robust than the normal proprietary architecture.
