Red Hat has revamped its strategy here to work more closely with partners, both local and global, putting more resources to focus on Thailand.
Thailand is one of the ASEAN countries with the highest potential for Red Hat which, along with its partners, will develop more applications on top of both Linux and its JBoss enterprise middleware suite, according to Teong Eng Guan, Red Hat's general manager for ASEAN countries.
Speaking in a group interview, he admitted that Red Hat had not done so much in the past, saying that the company was now changing and in a coming year would redefine partnerships, looking at recruiting partners and would work with the Thai Government.
Red Hat's enterprise customers in Thailand are in the telecom and financial sectors such as AIS and Bangkok Airways, as well as banks and now the company was working with some big manufacturers of IT product, although Teong declined to disclose their names.
"We have changed the business model today by providing infrastructure and support to customers," Teong said, noting that the enterprises would be able to use Red Hat solutions with ease.
Customers now have alternatives for support, with a 24x7 call center for global support or local support with on-site services by SCS Enterprise Thailand, the distributor of Red Hat, who also provides training and certification.
Red Hat would focus on the data center deployments, rather than on the desktop, he said, adding that the company provided three types of solutions: Unix to Linux migration, traditional middleware to JBoss middleware, and virtualization.
"We also have products for the desktop, but at present it's still the second priority," he said.
Red Hat has launched Integrated Virtualization Inside that allows users to deploy a single platform throughout the enterprise for all of their virtualization requirements at no additional cost and which is fully integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Red Hat's revenue in 2007 was US$400 million (12.6 billion baht), a 44 percent increase over 2006, Teong said, noting that the growth was mainly due to subscription revenue. He cited industry analyst Gartner Group who predicts that by 2011, at least 80 percent of all commercial software solutions would be based on open source and a survey shows that 50 percent of open source software was used for mission-critical applications, Teong said open source is the right direction for the future.
The general manager added that countries with a GDP of less than US$10,000 and with at least five percent of the population already online were among the highest adopters of open source software. Countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam have adopted government policies favoring open source software with increased security and sovereignty through independence and software code transparency.
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