Open source is no longer only an IT initiative: Red Hat India's Rajesh Rege

Besides lower infrastructure and software costs, it allows enterprises to innovate, says Rege

Besides lower infrastructure and software costs, it allows enterprises to innovate in a scalable, open and flexible environment, Rajesh Rege tells Sangeeta Tanwar
 
What are the key technology enablers that support digital transformation across industries?
 
Digital transformation has become an integral part of a growth strategy for every organisation. With online customers, businesses have to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the competition and effectively compete as a digital enterprise. The foundation of successful digital strategy is based on how best and how quickly an enterprise integrates digital technologies to drive maximum business growth and customer satisfaction. Open source helps businesses keep up with the pace and it has made way for many technology advances, including cloud computing, analytics, social, mobile, AI, IoT and blockchain.

 

What are the benefits offered by open-source technologies?
 
Open source is no longer only an IT initiative, but a strategy to create real business impact by transforming and modernising complex IT challenges and accelerating innovation and agility. We recently commissioned Forrester to do a survey with CIOs in Asia Pacific and the findings were insightful — they see open source as improving the evolution of technologies that are key to digital transformation, including cloud, DevOps, mobility, and big data. Fifty-one per cent of respondents from India report that their organisations have implemented open-source solution and 49 per cent of respondents plan to expand/implement open-source solutions within the next 12 months. In fact, open source is being used in various government projects under “Digital India”.

 
Besides lower infrastructure and software costs, open source allows enterprises and developers to innovate in a scalable, open and flexible environment. It gives them architectural control unlike proprietary software. It enables enterprises and government to avoid vendor lock-in while leveraging their existing IT infrastructure and applications, which is imperative for building hybrid cloud.
 
How can organisations utilise open source to craft digital experiences for consumers?
 
In today’s digital era, customers expect a seamless experience at every digital touch point. As the global leader in open-source software solutions, Red Hat is very well poised on the digital transformation value chain. Applications and solutions built on Red Hat open source are easy to integrate with existing systems and third-party solutions as they are based on open standards, making the organisation more agile and efficient. This also allows an organisation to build an ecosystem that promotes faster innovation, ability to scale up, modify and add new features to keep pace with changing trends and customer demands.

 
What are the two key emerging technologies in open source that can help businesses achieve scale and grow profits?
 
Today open source software has become the de-facto delivery model for all types of enterprise software and is at the core of every emerging technology.
 
The first key emerging technology in the open source realm is DevOps. DevOps is an agile software delivery process, a cultural transformation that goes by the notion of “you build it, you own it” to provide a better business delivery value chain. The goal is to bring in synergy between developers and operations to create more collaborative and enhanced communication platform for rapid innovation and robust delivery of software applications.

 
The second emerging technology is Open Hybrid Cloud. Red Hat Cloud Suite meets customers where they are in their cloud journey. Customers can optimise their existing IT and build new cloud services for infrastructure and applications with an integrated solution that includes storage and a common management platform across this hybrid IT environment. Red Hat Cloud Suite also works seamlessly with a portfolio of other Red Hat and third-party solutions so that customers can build true hybrid cloud environments across private and public domains as they set up their software-defined data center.
 
How can enterprises build an ecosystem that empowers organisations to take advantage of open-source software?

 
As pressure to innovate grows, enterprises are thinking beyond traditional approaches and exploring open-source technologies to deliver the speed, flexibility and innovation that help businesses flourish. But, organisations should not confuse community open source with enterprise open source software. Also, a well-equipped talent pool and a proper training mechanism is needed to further build a reliable ecosystem that empowers organisations to take maximum advantage of open-source software.