Red Hat India's Growth unaffected by global trends, embraces AI, says GM

Only difference now is that customers are spending money where there are returns on investment, and they should be able to see tech not just for the sake of it but for business benefit, he said

Marshal Correia, Vice President and General Manager, India, South Asia at Red Hat, is betting big on India. This is significant as India has traditionally been a strong market for Red Hat. In an interaction, Correia and Azhar Sayeed, Senior Director, Global Telco Technical Development, Red Hat, spoke with Ashutosh Mishra about how India is insulated from global trends. Edited excerpts:

How has the current demand situation been for the company in India?

Correia: Technology is at the forefront of everything. Many enterprises are becoming technology companies because it's all about driving innovation. Every customer I talk to, I think, has two key drivers. One is their desire to drive innovation and use technology to differentiate in the marketplace. The other part is about some kind of risk mitigation.

From our perspective, India is a bit insulated from what's really happening globally. So I haven't seen any drop in demand, so to say. If at all, across verticals, we are seeing continued demand. Like in banking, the transformation that is happening is phenomenal. Obviously, the Covid pandemic was a trigger, but even now in our discussions, we do not see any slowdown in digital transformation.

The only difference now is that customers are spending money where there are returns on the investment, and they should be able to see technology not just for the sake of it but for business benefit.

Has the macroeconomic weakness affected your position in the country?

Azhar: India is a rapidly growing market and the pace of change here is much higher than in other places. So while some of those macroeconomic conditions that you're talking about may apply in the context of high interest rates, and have been worse in some parts of the Western world, the impact of that percolating down here, we see, is going to be minimal because just the amount of demand and growth here is pretty high. So from that point of view, we are very well placed.

There has been a lot of buzz about emerging technologies, like Generative AI. So how is Red Hat making use of these technologies and how big is your team for emerging tech?

Correia: From our perspective, we believe there are two areas where we see huge impact, one of them is customer service, which we are already seeing, and the other is - I think technology is disrupting technology in terms of code generation. I feel where we are focused on is autonomous infrastructure, and hybrid cloud is at the centre of innovation.

India has democratised the network since the network has become so affordable, we are generating a lot of data. The data that the average Indian generates is equivalent to more than two large economies. Now at the core of AI is having data, and now there's enough data that is generated. So how do we make meaning out of it? And then how does the machine behave like a human being?

A lot of customers are talking about AI. In some industries, it's more predominant than others. AI is not an afterthought. Now, when a programmer is building a new application, they're trying to embed AI into it.

Azhar: Just like many companies, we are also using Gen AI internally for our toolsets. For example, we just launched a product called Ansible Lightspeed. The idea of Ansible Lightspeed is AI technology disrupting technology. Now you can do code generation automatically using AI. So if I just point that to your environment, it will detect your environment and create automation playbooks that can be executed. So that's really a very powerful paradigm that we've seen in terms of operations. The use of GenAI is pretty powerful in different use cases. In the telecom industry, again, in the context of anomaly detection and security, in automation, and this type of code generation stuff in the context of customer management, relationship management, these are all places where GenAI engineers and people are building a lot of toolsets.

How is AI impacting your business?

Correia: For us, it has a positive impact. AI needs huge data, so you need a lot of computing, you need a lot of identities on cloud. And the cloud actually enables it in a way. Now, we are building OpenShift for AI, because while we are not into building models, we want to make sure that the operations of AI are easy. In simple terms, there are a lot of workloads and AI is seeing maximum growth in terms of workloads. So in that sense, AI has an impact. One is the impact that we have on our business. Second, AI has an impact on our customers' business, in areas like customer service. It has a social impact in terms of sentiment analysis, in robotics etc. So it has a whole lot of gamut.

India has a big advantage, because of the ecosystem and our startup community. Just take a look around here and see how many use cases are coming. Really fascinating use cases in AI that use Cloud. So lots of technologies, and I think the most interesting part is how Indian startup communities are playing into it.