In an exclusive interview with Telecom Review, Adrian Pickering, Senior Regional Director MENA, Red Hat, shared details about the company's journey towards technological advancement in the region, their customer demands this year, and how open-source technology is essential in building secure and scalable IT infrastructures.
Why is Red Hat considered a key partner in the MENA region’s journey towards technological advancement?
The adoption of open-source technologies has really started to accelerate over the last four-to-five years. The customers are very willing to adopt open-source technologies given the advantages it brings in terms of rapid innovation and cost-effectiveness.
From a Red Hat perspective, our open-source solutions encompass a broad range of industries. We work with customers in banking and financial services, telecommunications, aviation, and oil & gas, among others.
How did Red Hat respond to evident customer demands in the region this year?
We have seen that most of our customers are moving towards a cloudified environment. Hence, most organizations are looking at how they can embrace cloud, particularly the hybrid cloud approach, and that is exactly what Red Hat does.
Our solutions are designed to allow enterprises or public sector organizations to utilize and gain all the benefits from distributing their technologies and application requirements across a hybrid-cloud environment.
How does Red Hat utilize open-source technology to build secure and scalable IT infrastructures?
Open-source technologies develop and innovate at a very rapid pace. Because of that, one of the key concerns when we bring open-source technologies to the marketplace is whether they are completely secure.
Through our process of screening, testing, and certifying before deploying the software to the customer, we’re absolutely confident that any sorts of risks they may face out there are mitigated.
We can demonstrate what we do to our customers and our partners, giving them the assurance that if they are doing business with Red Hat, and implementing our technologies, the platform is very secure.
What can customers expect from Red Hat MENA in 2025?
Firstly, we will continue to focus on our operating system and its adoption within more data centers. We are also increasingly gravitating towards devices located at the edge of the networks.
Secondly, you will see Red Hat continuing to focus on our Red Hat OpenShift Container platform, and, in particular, this relates to looking for customers who want to migrate their virtualization infrastructure, which is happening quite extensively across the Gulf region.
Lastly, we will continue leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) as Red Hat recently announced RHEL AI (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI)—the AI version of our operating system—as well as the OpenShift AI.
Exclusive Insight from Adrian Pickering: Red Hat at GITEX 2024: Driving the Future of Open Innovation
