Business Showcase: Red Hat, global provider of enterprise open source solutions

Describe the company – the elevator pitch for Red Hat 

Red Hat is the world’s leading , provider of enterprise open source solutions. We produce enterprise software but everything we develop happens in the open, visible to anyone.

Business Showcase: Red Hat, global provider of enterprise open source solutions

We use a community powered approach to deliver Linux, hybrid cloud, container and Kubernetes technologies. We help our customers with their digital transformation programmes, integrate new and existing apps, and we help them to develop cloud native applications all whilst automating, securing and managing complex environments.

How are you different?

What differentiates Red Hat from everyone else is the culture – our former CEO, Jim Whitehurst, even wrote a book about it – “The Open organization”.

Here at Red Hat, ideas matter, no matter where they came from, a senior executive or an intern. This concept of meritocracy is not just applied internally but also externally.

For example, because all our products are developed in the open – anyone and everyone can provide feedback or make suggestions on how to improve our products. If someone has a great idea for a feature and others agree that it is a good idea, there is a good chance that this particular feature might in fact get implemented and subsequently supported as part of a Red Hat product.

This unique organisational model makes Red Hat different from any other organisation.

Why will you do well?

Software and software development move exceptionally fast these days in comparison to 10 or 20 years ago, which is mainly driven by customer demand. If you think about a retail bank, smartphones have completely changed the way we interact with them. Companies need to constantly innovate to stay relevant in the digital age. At the same time, there is also a need to support these applications in a trusted way and support the assurance that vulnerabilities are patched and consumers are protected.

What I just described is in essence what we do. Our products are continuously evolving and are driven by communities out in the open while we provide the assurance for customers that we support them for 5, 7 or even 10 years down the road if needed.

For nearly 30 years Red Hat has been a trusted partner that delivered software that enables innovation, with the assurance that innovation can happen in a secure and safe way.

Where are you based?

Globally, Red Hat is represented in more than 100 locations and 40 countries. Our Irish offices include three locations in Waterford, Cork and Dublin. Currently we have people working for Red Hat in Ireland, with a variety of backgrounds – software engineering, product support, professional services, data science, finance and sales.

When was the company launched?

Red Hat was founded in 1993 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company set up its first European office in 1999  in the UK and moved its EMEA headquarter in 2004 to Munich.

What have been your biggest wins to date?

There are quite a few wins in Ireland, the one that I would consider the most interesting is a joint solution between Version 1, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and Red Hat.

The Version 1 SmartText offering is  a machine learning (ML) text analysis solution that can correctly categorize documents while protecting back-end systems and delivering new features faster.

This project managed to win a global innovation award within Red Hat. There are only 5 of these winners each year and the competition is in the hundred across all of Red Hat’s customer base. Showing this kind of level not just in Ireland, but specifically within the public sector, is a great achievement and really shows what is possible.

Who are you trying to attract to your product?

There is not a single type of Red Hat customer. If you think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux for example, you can treat it as an operating system in a datacenter that hosts applications, you update it every so often and with Red Hat’s support, you can be assured that you are supported for 10 years down the road.

The other extreme are customers that are interested in a highly available architecture for their SAP S4/Hana deployments, or a bank that needs to run a secure multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud operating system for critical applications, or a retailer that wants to manage thousands of edge devices.

And then there is of course everything in between.

What is important to us is that it is never an either / or. Our products allow you to build and run critical infrastructure applications in a secure way in wherever you like (datacenter, cloud, edge), enabling our customers to be agnostic to a specific vendor or provider.

Read Red Hat's response to the war in Ukraine. https://t.co/en35TtvtlL

— Red Hat, Inc. (@RedHat) March 8, 2022

What tips would you give to others looking to build their business?

Invest in people. That can mean hiring great talent, developing talent yourself but also means to build meaningful relationships with customers.

It is very easy to achieve a quick win but lasting relationships, internally and externally, will help you to succeed in the long-run.

Over the past few years we have built great relationships with customers and partners locally that put us in a position to be successful for not just the next 2-3 years but the next 10 years.

Tell us about your team?

We have a great team that is made up of people from all over the world, the United States, India, Germany, England and Ireland of course. What I really appreciate about the team is that everyone brings something completely unique to the table, not just professionally, but also cultural and personality wise.

This is also a great opportunity for people to learn from each other of course. For example, many of the younger people on the team continuously challenge viewpoints from more experienced members of the team.

At the same time, there is a tremendous potential for the more experienced people to mentor new members of the team and help them to grow at an accelerated pace.

What are your plans for the future?

Our main focus is of course to grow Red Hat’s presence in Ireland, the only way to achieve this is to excel at what we do: Helping our customers solve problems and drive innovation.

This means for us that we have to work much closer with our customers and really understand their challenges and provide actual solutions to their problems.

Other than that, we want to give back to communities in Ireland and get children and students excited about technology and open source.

We organise local user groups and engage with schools and universities in a variety of activities and last year our team participated in the EU Codeweek.

What are your favourite tech gadgets?

Very good question! This changes constantly, setting up my home network, doing all the cabling myself and connecting a bunch of smart home equipment was probably the thing I enjoyed the most recently.

What tech gadgets do you wish you could use to help you?

AI and digital assistants are improving. I think there’s a lot more they could do to provide a more integrated experience that helps people to organise their work and life commitments.  I also think there is a lot of potential in the VR/AR space still. With more and more people working remotely and teams being distributed all over the world, there is a lot of potential for VR meetings and more interactive equipment in general.

How do people get in touch with you?

The best way to get in touch with me is via LinkedIn or E-Mail ([email protected]).

More about Keith ->

Software industry professional with over 15 years experience. My career has spanned from engineer, to consultant, architect, professional services management and now into business development.

I combine my technical knowledge and experience with a keen commercial and industry sense in order to drive mutually beneficial results for Red Hat and our customers.

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