http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RedhatIndonesia/ -------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from CNETAsia. -------------------------------------------------------------- Red Hat expands Asian ops By Winston Chai, CNETAsia 20/1/2005 URL: http://asia.cnet.com/news/software/0,39037051,39214107,00.htm SINGAPORE--Red Hat is bulking up its operations in Asia-Pacific to better cope with the growing customer demand for its Linux offerings. As part of its Asian expansion, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company has relocated its regional headquarters from Brisbane, Australia, to Singapore. According to Steve McWhirter, Red Hat's vice president for Asia- Pacific, Australia will continue to be the regional hub for development, engineering and customer support, and there will be no staff movement between the two countries as a result of this move. "The Brisbane center will remain as one of our development centers in Asia-Pacific," he told CNETAsia in an interview. However, sales, marketing, finance and human resource functions will mostly be centralized in Singapore, said McWhirter. To cope with its expanded role, the Singapore headquarters will increase staff headcount from 15 currently to 30 by year-end. In addition, plans to open a customer support center in the republic are also on the drawing board, he confirmed. If finalized, the Singapore-based center will be Red Hat's third such support facility in Asia-Pacific, with the first based in its flagship regional office in Australia and the second in India. These initiatives come on top of the firm's aggressive expansion efforts in other parts of Asia, particularly in the Linux hotbed of China. Red Hat made its mainland foray with the opening of its Beijing office in Nov. 2004, and this will be followed by a Shanghai subsidiary to be established later this year. "Red Hat, as part of our worldwide investment strategy, has identified Asia-Pacific as the fastest-growing market internationally and accordingly we will be getting an appropriate share of the funding," McWhirter said. Previously, the company's strongholds were largely in more mature Linux markets in Europe and the United States. McWhirter's revelation goes in tandem with optimistic market projections for Linux sales in the region. According to IDC, sales of Linux-based servers will increase by 22.8 percent globally this year, outpacing the overall server market which is forecasted to grow by a mere 3.8 percent. In Asia, the research firm expects Linux software license revenues to grow by 78.6 percent from US$6.48 million last year to US$11.6 million in 2005. In the past few years, Linux has garnered support from authorities in North Asian markets like China, Japan and Korea, as well as developing Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. Singapore has long been considered by industry watchers as a lukewarm Linux market but, according to McWhirter, the tide appears to be changing in favor of the open-source camp here. "I've met multiple government departments here personally and all of them, to a certain extent, have plans for some Linux implementation. All of them are talking about increasing servers and desktops deployed on Linux," he said In June last year, Red Hat and its longtime ally Oracle set up a Linux applications porting center in Singapore to rally support from third-party software developers in the region. The project was supported by the Economic Development Board of Singapore. Last October, Singapore's Defense Ministry announced that it had deployed the OpenOffice productivity package, which includes software for word processing and spreadsheets, on 5,000 new computers. The government agency plans to increase the number to nearly 20,000 by 2006. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Linux/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
