New Economy
Swearing by Gandhi, Red Hat to expand Indian presence
Indo-Asian News Service
New York, December 24, 2004
Red Hat, a leading proponent of open source programming platform Linux that swears by Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy, is looking to create a stronger presence in India.
Chief executive of the Raleigh, North Carolina- based company - which has reported a 155 per cent jump in its third-quarter net income - Matthew Szulik told The New York Times that Red Hat is using its 55 local software development partners and 100 authorized training partners for its India expansion programme.
The company is planning to introduce interface in five Indian languages in February - Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali and Gujarati. In the next 15 months it is planning to cover 13 languages. The company will offer operating system, e-mail client, web browser and open office in Indian languages.
Red Hat announced quarterly revenue of $50.9 million, a 55 per cent jump over the same period last year. However, the figure is less than the $51.8 million expected by analysts.
The company sold 132,000 subscriptions to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product in the quarter. Out of those, 119,000 were for use on business servers and 13,000 were for technical computing clusters or Web sites.
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win," the company quotes Gandhi's maxim to underscore its advocacy of open-source programming and the derision it faces from "the establishment" of the software world such as Microsoft. "We find a universal truth in Gandhi's message."
"Over the years the establishment has claimed Linux wasn't ready, wrote it off as too expensive, and compared open source to cancer and communism. All the while they declared it to be enemy number one. We know why. It starts with the open source", the company's website says.
Apart from India, the company is also seeking the market in China, having recently opened an office in Beijing.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.