Red Hat: Advancing Malaysia’s digital economy with open source

By Digital News Asia March 29, 2018

Malaysia is now seeing continuous innovation as incremental innovation is not enough anymore
The digital economy is indeed critical to the country’s growth and success

Red Hat: Advancing Malaysia’s digital economy with open source

RED Hat, a provider of open source solutions announced that their global revenue for the fourth quarter for fiscal year 2018 (Q4 FY2018) is US$772 million (approx. RM2.99 billion). The Asia Pacific region (APAC), of which Malaysia is part of contributed to these earnings as 17% of Red Hat’s total bookings came from the APAC region.

Red Hat Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong (SEATH) vice president and general manager Damien Wong, shared that application development and emerging technologies saw an encouraging growth as it accounted for US$173 million (approx. RM670 million) of Red Hat’s global Q4 FY18 revenue.

Speaking on Malaysia’s journey towards advancing its digital economy, Wong shared that the digital economy is indeed critical to the country’s growth and success.

In line with that, the policies and initiatives that are already in place today are encouraging the adoption of technology and fuelling the country towards a more advanced and matured digital economy.

By engaging with industry partners such as Red Hat, the transformation speed of the country’s economy can be spurred.

Apart from that, Wong also elaborated on industry trends in Malaysia and the region that are a clear reflection of the steady rate of open source adoption.

These trends include continuous innovation as businesses realise that incremental innovation is just not enough anymore; strong spending for IT as Gartner predicts that Malaysia’s IT spending is set to increase by 5.7% to RM65.2 billion this year (2018), compared with RM61.6 billion last year; and upward mobile adoption as it creates unique markets and business models that cater to a new generation of consumers embracing a mobile-centric world.

In Malaysia, Red Hat has been helping numerous organisations to reduce IT costs and downtime and also innovate as well as modernise legacy IT infrastructures.

Some of these organisations include Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM), Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB), CTOS Data System Sdn Bhd and Grab (Southeast Asia).