Red Hat Inc., has achieved its 56th consecutive quarter of growth, said Red Hat’s ASEAN VP and GM, Damian Wong whilst he was in Malaysia to announce Red Hat’s business performance in the region.
Interestingly, growth for Red Hat during their 2016 financial year, are in three significant areas: applications and development, infrastructure-related technology and training and consulting. Applications and development which comprises Red Hat’s middleware solutions, their cloud solutions and operations system, registered the highest growth at 37-percent.
Wong also observed that while their growth is attributed to all industries, but it was particularly so in areas that have complex IT, like financial services, government, cloud service providers, technology and media.
“These industries tend to use Red Hat for mission-critical type of workloads,” he explained.
Red Hat technologies
Vendors are beginning to see the value of a hybrid cloud environment. This is perhaps the more pragmatic way, rather than ripping legacy, on-premise IT out and replacing them with cloud-based or next-generation technologies.
A compromise for co-existence is the theme for most IT vendors, currently.
For Red Hat, they see that no matter the type of IT environment an organisation has – physical, virtual, private or public – the underlying infrastructure; a common storage platform is crucial.
Wong said, “Storage is a key inhibitor is not managed properly for applications like big data. And Red Hat Storage is a cost-effective way (to store), in a software-defined manner.
To ensure that the right workloads are being housed on the right infrastructure, there is Red Hat’s heterogeneous cloud management platform that can move workloads across footprints in seamless manner.
The leading open source company also boasts full-engineered solutions in all these different environments; RHEL for physical, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation for virtual environments, Open Stack for private clouds and Open Shift for public clouds; and all these based upon their operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or RHEL.
This region’s cloud story
Leading research has found that infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) accounts for 40-percent of market for cloud services, although software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the fastest growing cloud category in Malaysia.
Wong observed, “In Asia businesses are moving from legacy towards IaaS. The level of transaction is increasing in the IaaS space.”
This alludes to increased use of data centre services as these businesses hand over some control over their IT, to a third-party provider.
Wong admitted, “More customers are looking at alternative platforms for new business initiatives. These are customers from the financial services industry, telcos and public sector.”
Lock-in… again
According to the ASEAN VP, enterprises with legacy environments are finding that it is costly to maintain, and they are looking at alternatives to roll out. Open source and Red Hat tends to stand out for them.
Commenting about the current activity around converged appliances and the need for businesses to quickly deploy and scale up resources, Wong cautioned about lock-in.
He said, while there are many leading OEM hardware players who are working to put Red Hat technology into their hyperconverged technology stack, businesses have to be careful about not being locked in.
“You would be moving from one version of lock-in to a lock-in of hardware and software!” he concluded.
