By Orlaith Finn
With GITEX Technology Week fast approaching, the world’s leading service providers are gearing up to showcase the latest innovations in key areas. Red Hat, multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community, will be there to present its most recent products and solutions. Lee Miles, vice president of Red Hat in the CEMEA region, spoke to Telecom Review prior to the event held at Dubai World Trade Center.
What is Red Hat showcasing at this year’s edition of GITEX?
GITEX Technology Week is the ideal platform for technology pioneers like Red Hat to introduce the future innovations that will shape the things to come. This is why Red Hat is proud to be featuring a number of new products at GITEX Technology Week such as OPENSHIFT 4.0 and Ansible plus Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, which is the intelligent OS for bare metal, virtual machine and cloud deployments for both on and off premise.
Being the VP at an open-source provider, do you think that open source is the key to unlock digital transformation?
Digital transformation is a recurrent theme in the evolutionary space of the digital age. As a leading provider of open source solutions, we at Red Hat believe that open source technologies will redefine the future for enterprises. So much untapped potential exists in the open source community, which is why our mission is to unlock this potential and drive collaborative efforts towards building software solutions that push the boundaries of technology and help businesses take the challenges of tomorrow head on.
Do you see increased appetite for open source adoption in the Middle East? Why?
Across the region, businesses and individuals alike are known for being early adopters of pioneering technology trends and waves. With open source solutions, the acceleration of innovation and adoption for cloud, big data and analytics, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain will take business agility, cost-effectiveness and scalability to new levels. At Red Hat, we believe the appetite for open source will only increase as leading countries seek innovative thinking and solutions to facilitate their digital transformation agendas and national strategies. I think as the awareness of open source solutions and technology stacks continues to grow, we can expect to see this realm flourish even further throughout the years ahead.
Red Hat announced in July its acquisition by IBM. How important was it for the two companies to join forces? How is it helping you meet your customers’ needs?
With Red Hat and IBM joining forces there are a number of great affinities that we share. The biggest of these is an aligned perspective towards problem solving and engineering ways to foster open source innovation and simply IT processes through open hybrid cloud for vendors and organizations across the region and the world. The open source way is a passion, and this binding relationship further emphasizes both entities commitment to finding world-changing solutions driven out of sheer passion for the open source ecosystem.
What are the challenges that your customers often face? How do you help them counter them?
Our customers tend to come to us in need of solutions to help solve their biggest IT challenges and opportunities awaiting them on the other side. By providing flexible, open technologies, we are able to help them bridge the gap and take charge of any IT challenge.
Overall, enterprises are looking for hyper-converged infrastructure to unlock multiple benefits. This can provide clear cost savings through saving energy, reducing hardware, reducing software subscriptions, management costs and space requirements in the datacenter. Additionally, they can benefit from having a single budget, a single team managing the infrastructure, simplified planning and procurement, streamlined deployment and management, and a single support stack – with one specialized vendor to call on for help: Red Hat.
