//////////////////////////
Adrian Pickering, Regional GM for Red Hat
for the Middle East and North Africa
R
ed Hat is the world’s leading provider
of open source software solutions and
has built up its reputation utilising a
community-powered approach to provide
reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux,
middleware, storage and virtualisation
technologies. As a connective hub in a
global network of enterprises, partners, and
open source communities, Red Hat helps
create relevant, innovative technologies that
liberate resources for growth and prepare
customers for the future of IT. Here we talk
to Adrian Pickering, Regional GM for Red Hat
for the Middle East and North Africa, about
the company’s past, present and future.
How has the industry changed over
the last 25 years?
“
AT AN
ENTERPRISE
LEVEL WE
ARE SEEING
THE WORLD
BECOME
VERY MUCH A
HYBRID CLOUD
ENVIRONMENT.
www.intelligentcio.com
25 years is a long time in technology. Back in
the day when I was getting into the industry
everything was proprietary operating
systems. Then we moved into the age of
where Unix operating systems started to
come on the market. Then we had the client
sever revolution and here we are today. From
a Red Hat perspective there is an increasing
acceptance of open source-based software
in the market. I think that is another
evolution of the market. It’s interesting to
see how networking is being impacted by
open-source software and software defined
networking which is really starting to get
some traction now.
a particular project, so anyone: a student
or a developer in a company somewhere,
can actually contribute their efforts to an
open source project. At any given time
there are thousands of open source projects
which are in development. Individuals form
a community and try to solve a particular
problem. It is a community development as
compared to a proprietary development.
What Red Hat does as the world’s leader
in open source solutions are a number of
things. So first of all, in terms of the Red Hat
employee base, which is about 10,000 people
worldwide, we have our own population
of developers who work with communities
and community projects. What we do is
we provide constructive feedback and
contributions to the community project so the
software that is being developed is relevant
and appropriate for the market place.
That’s one of the things that Red Hat does
but I think the most fundamental component
of Red Hat’s contribution to open source is we
take the open source software and we put it
through a variety of processes.
In terms of Red Hat what does open
source mean? For example, we will certify and test open
source software in multiple different
environments. We have a laboratory
environment where we can test software
on the different components and certify it
as being stable, bug free, secure and so on
so that an enterprise can put that into their
environment with confidence to run their
business applications.
The fundamental difference with open
source technologies or software is that it is
developed by community contributions to We document the products and provide
24/7/365 support for that particular open
source technology. It is quite a different
INTELLIGENTCIO
41