14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat sees Thailand as one of the ASEAN - Association of South East Asian Nations - countries with high potential for developing more applications on top of both Linux and JBoss enterprise middleware suite.
Teong Eng Guan, Red Hat's general manager for ASEAN countries, in a group interview, admitted that Red Hat didn't do too much in the past, but that would change. In the coming year, the company will redefine partnerships, looking at recruiting partners and would like to work with the Thai government.
Red Hat's enterprise customers in Thailand are mostly from the telecom and financial sectors, and now the company is working with a large enterprise that manufactures IT products. Teong didn't disclose its name yet.
Teong Eng Guan noted that the enterprises would be able to use Red Hat solutions with ease and said: "We have changed the business model today by providing infrastructure and support to customers."
Customers now have an alternative for support, with a non-stop call center for global or local support with on-site services by SCS Enterprise Thailand, the distributor of Red Hat, who also provides training and certification.
Red Hat will move its focus from desktop to data center deployments, with three types of solutions: Unix to Linux migration, traditional middleware to JBoss middleware and virtualization. Teong said, referring to this subject: "We also have products for the desktop, but at present it's still the second priority." Users can deploy a single platform throughout the enterprise for all their virtualization needs, through Integrated Virtualization Inside, a service included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Red Hat's revenue increased last year with 44% over 2006, mainly because of the subscription revenue. Teong noted that countries with a Gross Domestic Product of less than $10,000 and with at least five percent of the population already online were among the highest adopters of open source solutions.