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March - 2013 - issue > View Point

Open Source Middleware: Reaching an Inflection Point

Arun Kumar
General Manager-Red Hat India
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Arun Kumar
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) is an American multinational software company that provides open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Raleigh the company has a market cap of $10.42 billion.

The last decade saw Linux and open source being synonymous with Red Hat but this is just one half of the story. Today open source has a much larger impact on the customer ecosystem and partner ecosystem than just Linux.

There has been a sea of transition and the focus has today shifted away from cost. The transformation of the value transition has gone from just 'cost' to a number of different things. CIOs today are more adamant about open standards, than they were before. They are more demanding of vendors delivering open platforms in open standards. This move to open standards is very visible now. The value proposition that open source brings to the table resonates very closely with customer's view of open standards. Another area of dramatic change is that even though cost is essential, importance is also given to performance.

The way software is consumed today is also transitioning and moving away from the traditional proprietary model towards licensing models of subscriptions. In a cloud perspective the move is from a capex model to opex model.

In the Indian context people are yet to make the transition to cloud, however in the West the transition has already been made and they have moved out of the legacy. But there are several exceptions and there are some very forward looking Indian CIOs who have played bets and created nimble architectures today.


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