Red Hat vows commitment in Korea

By Kim Yoo-chul

Jay Hahm Red Hat country manager

Red Hat, the NYSE-listed leading solution provider for open source software, Monday vowed steady investment to foster the open source system here.

“We firmly believe our open source solutions will bring tangible results considering the huge appetites for open source software by firms regardless of business segments,” according to its new country manager Jay Hahm in a news conference at the COEX InterContinental Hotel, southern Seoul.

This is the first time the manager has announced its business plan since he took the top seat in April this year.

The nation’s top mobile carrier SK Telecom, Korea Exchange and POSCO ICT are one of the local companies that are using Red Hat-patented open source solutions.

“Recently, the Korean government is launching a campaign to pay for licensing fees in return for using software developed by well-known software firms. But it’s true that companies feel the burden of paying for software updates, which we believe is not necessarily warranted,” the manager Hahm told the local media.

He stressed Red Hat’s solutions are ideally positioned to lessen such financial burdens as it only charges “small money” for installment and updates without “licensing fees.”

“Red Hat will role as the right bridge to link Korean developers into engineers, globally, in order to expand communities that are related to open source developers,” the executive said.

Red Hat, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, reported 45 consecutive quarters of revenue growth thanks to the growing attention of its free-of-charge solutions, it said in a statement.

The U.S.-based firm has expanded its portfolio of open source products and services to include virtualization, cloud computing, Linux, middleware, and storage, serving as a strategic IT partner for enterprise customers.

“Red Hat is a leading connective hub in the global network of customers, partners, research and academic organizations, and open source communities. Bringing these innovative groups together fosters collaboration, and the result is technology that meets the needs of today’s computing environment more effectively than any one group could have created alone,” said Hahm.

Many organizations ranging from the finance industry to governments, telecommunications to media, logistics to retail, all utilize open source solutions to power most of their IT related activities in a secure and reliable way.

Amid the ever-changing IT environment, Red Hat is leveraging its open innovation development model and subscription business model to help define the next generation of the data center.

“Our focus is on innovation and end-user value through open source software, which delivers interoperability and flexibility. Based on our open source technologies and solutions, we will work hard to expand the Korean open source ecosystem,” he said.