Red Hat are returning to GITEX this year with the digital transformation journey at the top of the agenda for businesses across the region.
While taking advantage of technology was always at the forefront for most companies, this has been accelerated by the Covid-19 global pandemic.
Red Hat has been helping many of its customers on this accelerated journey, both in the evolution of their IT architectures, hybrid cloud strategy and the cultural change necessary to be able to remove organisational inertia and innovate at speed of business change.
Phil Andrews, vice president and general manager, Red Hat CEMEA, explains what visitors to this year’s show can expect from the company and why GITEX is such an important event for them.
Can you provide a brief outline of the latest technologies you’ll be highlighting at the show?
As the world’s leading provider of enterprise class supported open source software solutions that are now used extensively in enabling the “digital business” of tomorrow, we aim to meet with and bring together influential stakeholders from all of the business sectors that Red Hat addresses to discuss their growth strategies and to define ambitious objectives in the decade ahead.
Practically the entire transformation to a cloud-based IT world has been driven by Open Source Software, and we build on this community-powered approach and use our organisation to refine, quality engineer and support reliable and high-performing software products used to build a cloud ready digital architecture – Linux, middleware, messaging and integration platforms, storage and the world class OpenShift hybrid cloud ready container based technologies.
All of these are ready for use in high performance, high reliability digital enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructures. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services to support our customers on the journey.
As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that are fully ready for long-term enterprise class use both on premise and across hybrid clouds, more importantly liberating scarce customer technical resources for growth and differentiation of their business by developing better digital services.
Many, many national governments and leading national and international financial services organisations, airlines, transportation, communication providers, oil and gas companies worldwide and many more rely on Red Hat to build their next generation digital businesses. Many of these organisations are also based in the GCC area.
How has the pandemic impacted demand for – and development of – technologies crucial to an organisation’s digital transformation journey, including hybrid cloud and edge computing?
Despite technology already playing a key role in the competitiveness of businesses and effectiveness of government agencies pre-Covid, the pandemic has had a major impact on technology decision making over the last 18 months.
Many companies already had business continuity plans as well as (in many cases early) digital transformation/digital business delivery plans, but many were not fully ready to address the fast-moving and unknown variables of the pandemic. Consequently, most organisations, public and private, have had to accelerate the move to virtual working environments and digital service delivery environments at a much faster pace.
Typically organisations appointed central, accountable technology transformation leaders, supported by the right cloud architecture strategies were put in place, adding cross-functional development teams harnessed to create software assets to manage the evolving crisis.
By leveraging technology to address the need to become both a virtual enterprise and digitally transformed business for the customer in the fastest possible time.
By creating an IT architecture framework to allow for rapid development of new software assets, the ability to run and deploy on premise or across any cloud environment, the capability to integrate with both existing enterprise applications running the business, and new services in the cloud companies have been able to deliver new capabilities at an astonishing rate. In some cases preserving businesses that could have failed completely.
Can you discuss Red Hat’s open source ethos a bit? Is it something that can exclusively benefit multinationals and large organisations? In layman’s terms, how can an open source route benefit SMEs and micro-sized businesses?
Open source has become more and more prevalent and essential to the entire IT industry in the past decade, and with the evolution of cloud, new development tools, new applications delivered “software as a service”, big data technologies, and mobile technologies (all of which owe much of their progress today to open source software) has created an environment that itself has become a way to accelerate digital business innovation.
Open source software communities are the places where much of the aforementioned innovation in today’s software industry happens. A glance at all the open source projects in the cloud-native and machine learning spaces gives a good sense of this; our survey’s numbers confirm it. The pace of innovation of the software is significantly increased due to the large communities of developers involved.
There is a “however” – and this is where Red Hat’s ethos comes in – freely available, unsupported open source software can be changing quickly and be challenging to use within the discipline needed to run Enterprise IT Operations – and in some cases, if not managed properly, can cause security/reliability challenges. Red Hat’s business model is to take on the work of “finishing the job” and then being there “to support” – from highly innovative open source projects to fully finished, fully supported, fully tested and managed open source enterprise software products.
IT leaders widely view Red Hat Enterprise open source software as a superior form of software with higher quality, more innovation, more compatibility with industry standard hardware and software and even better security than the alternatives. We help customers build reliable digital businesses.
Furthermore, they also widely appreciate that the full value of enterprise open source is provided through vendors who actively participate in the open source development model rather than just repackaging open source code. Collectively, it’s a recognition that enterprise open source is increasingly the future of software.
What were some of the highlights of Red Hat at GITEX 2020? How are you changing things up for this year’s edition?
From our perspective here at Red Hat, we participated in GITEX 2020 to show how our technologies help our customers, both commercial and government, introduce new innovations to their markets through their digital transformation journey, to network with new and existing clients, and interact with industry personnel and representatives from public and private sector organisations across the GCC.
Last year, we integrated digital elements for guidance and experience navigation, demonstrated the playfulness and interactive nature of our brand, and invited attendees to ‘Go Slow, Look Closer and Dig Deeper’. We showcased products, solutions, and new functionality, taking attendees on a journey through the virtuous cycle of cutting edge tech that includes Red Hat open source, edge computing, open hybrid cloud, and digital transformation and verticals.
This year, we are looking forward to interacting with our customers through both virtual pre-booked meetings with our team and on-site bookings that are available for detailed product deep-dives.
What does participation at GITEX mean to Red Hat?
We are proud of our long-standing association with the event, which is a focal point for the majority of regional technology users. It allows us to ensure we have the experts at the event that deeply understand the digital journey all of our clients have embarked on. Experts that not only understand our technology and how it works, but more importantly how the technology, services, training and expertise we offer can accelerate that journey.
We also aim to have executives available that have a deep understanding of the technical and organisational development needs of industries like financial services and telecommunication providers and the ways in which we can help them be ahead of the game in this new world of digital engagement.
We also attend GITEX because the event is a comprehensive platform for showcasing and experiencing the future. As such, we are looking forward to demonstrating how open source will benefit the enterprise community in the months and years ahead.
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