14 DAY TRIAL // Determined to take over Asia, Red Hat has turned its eyes on India. The Linux vendor has bought out its joint-venture partner and assigned $20 million for investments over the next two to three years, doubled its Pune-based research staff and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with an official body to work jointly at modernizing the Indian educational system.
The buyout is expected to strengthen Red Hat's position in the Indian software market, according to Red Hat executive VP and CFO, Charlie Peters. The company has promoted open-source across several government and private segments and has already released Linux in five Indian languages - Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, and plans support for eight more dialects.
Recently, Red Hat signed a MOU with Confederation of Indian Industry's (CII) Shiksha India Trust to work on making the latest in information technology and educational content available to educational institutions. "India has the second-largest educational system in the world, and there is an urgent need to modernize it using information technology. Open source can serve as a tool for modernizing India, so we are happy to work with Red Hat to deploy our content and open source software in the service of Indian education," commented Professor Y.S. Rajan, principal advisor to the CII.
"This agreement signifies the growing acceptance of open source in India. We will work with Shiksha India to create a community of Indian educators able to create content and software that can be shared freely among educational institutions," added Javed Tapia, who served as director of Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd.