During the KL leg of the Red Hat Forum Tour that is themed “Power of Participation”, Red Hat vice president and chief technologist Chris Wright along with Forrester’s Frederic Giron met with the media to talk about the innovation that open source is enabling for organisations that want to transform and leverage disruptive technologies like cloud, mobile and big data.
Red Hat ASEAN General Manager Damien Wong drew attention to notable fact that technologies like public clouds and big data were born from open source innovation and/or projects.
Wright further commented that in fact some of these tech trends are driven by only open source innovation.
Forrester’s Giron was also there to give a sneak peek into the study they were commissioned by Red Hat to do about how “Open Source Drives Digital Innovation.” The study which began in August surveys 454 tech decision makers in the Asia Pacific region.
Giron had observed that at least half if not a strong majority of respondents, recognise the correlation between open source and innovation.
Against a backdrop of digital transformation – steady growth still
Globally, Red Hat’s second quarter revenue results reflected an 18-percent year-over-year growth for its infrastructure offerings, while their application development and emerging technologies categories grew 33-percent.
Red Hat President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst said, “Digital transformation and hybrid cloud computing are changing how applications are built, deployed and managed.
“As organisations adopt agile application development technologies like Linux containers, they are able to rely on Red Hat as their strategic partner to modernise their infrastructure and application development platforms.”
Red Hat Innovation Awards
Government-linked agency Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) was also awarded the 2016 Red Hat Innovation Awards. TNB won this award for its modernised IT infrastructure that now offers foundation for its SAP applications, besides also boosting efficiency and enhancing their customers’ experience.
This modern open source platform is based on a Red Hat solution, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Satellite, and through work with Red Hat Consulting.
Southeast Asia countries Indonesia and Singapore, also yielded three more APAC winners. In fact, the two Singapore winners were from the public sector.
When asked about Red Hat’s penetration into the public sector for this region, Wong shared, “While the IT in this region’s public sector started off with proprietary software, I’m encouraged by the take up of open source (in that segment).”
