IT firm Red Hat mulls more investments in startups to push growth

Red Hat invested in start-ups in India, Israel, is also expanding its workforce to cash in on opportunities in telecom, government space

IT firm Red Hat is actively looking at investing in start-ups working on innovation, infrastructure and open source technologies to further accelerate its growth in the country.

Red Hat, which has invested in start-ups in India and Israel, is also expanding its workforce in the country to cash in on the opportunities in the telecom and government space.

"Everyone is attracted to social start-ups, although core start-ups in tech sector are fewer and fewer... Innovation, infrastructure and whether it can be open sourced are the exciting things Red Hat looks for in start-ups," Red Hat Executive Vice President Global Sales and Service Arun Oberoi said.

He further said growth in India is "much faster" than any other markets. He, however, did not share revenue details.

"India is a big consumer of information. This is the digital age where consumption of information is growing exponentially. If you look at Digital India, it is a great initiative because its the way to reach the villages," he said.

Similarly, new business models are coming up that will redefine the telecom sector and investments in this direction are already underway and these are exciting times, he added.

"Red Hat provides contemporary cloud centric services and refreshed applications. The key is not to discard the past and bring it along by linking to present day application. Our strategy is scale up and scale out," Oberoi said.

Last year, the government had decided to give preference to open source software (OSS) over proprietary in e-governance procurements, a move aimed at reducing project costs.

Oberoi said correct awareness and benefits of open source is a big challenge in India and the company is working in that direction.

"For that, we are also focusing on expanding our headcount, bringing in talent pool from top engineering and business schools. Globally, we are creating the bandwidth to capture the massive opportunity in digital world," he said.

Red Hat's headcount in India is around 1,000 people, while globally it has about 8,000 people.