Red Hat forges on, 44 straight quarters of revenue growth

Red Hat forges on, 44 straight quarters of revenue growth: Page 2 of 2

By Gabey Goh May 15, 2013

A clean slate

Also present at the Red Hat briefing was Steven Rosen (pic), director of IT at YTL Communications Sdn Bhd, who claimed that his company achieved greater efficiency in services and cost-savings on their IT infrastructure after leveraging Red Hat’s open source solutions.

“Twenty-five years ago, open source was considered the hobbyist version of IT, but today it is a mainstream standard that offers a more cost-efficient way for building our infrastructure,” he said.

Rosen claimed that when the YES 4G network was launched in November 2010, it covered 60% of peninsular Malaysia and today, coverage has been extended to 80%.

“I had the luxury of coming on board with a clean slate, with no legacy infrastructure to deal with, and was able to put all the pieces in the right place and start things off with the sterile environment,” he said.

Rosen said the end result was the delivery of quality in a transparent, standardised and cost-efficient manner leveraging almost the entire portfolio of Red Hat solutions, such as Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Network, Java Beans Open Source Software (JBoss), Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Journaled File System (JFS2) and Red Hat Clustering (RHC).

Another YTL Communications initiative which leverages on Red Hat’s solutions is the 1BestariNet project – an ambitious technology-in-education project which seeks to provide connectivity to the nation’s 10,000 schools – which was officially awarded to the company by the Malaysian Government in early 2012.

Rosen said that the project’s first phase is slated to be completed by year’s end, and reported that what was pitched and designed has seen "100% alignment in deployment and implementation."

When asked to comment on the issues surrounding the project, especially concerns over a potential 'provider lock-in,' Rosen claimed that from a technology perspective, the plug-and-play components and architecture are transparent to the end-user, with built-in security measures to ensure a safe and secure environment for children to access the Internet.

“The fact is that right now, there are not a lot of other options in terms of service providers. No other provider can provide the speeds and access we can via our wireless network. To pull fibre optic cables to 10,000 schools is just not feasible, and I don’t know what the other players had in store. But for now, why hold the country back from options just because there aren't more operators to provide that access?” he said.

“I don’t know what the future landscape will look like but we are very clear with ours. We are always going to aspire to be the fastest and the highest quality service provider, and as telecommunications technology falls to the wayside and voice becomes another service, we are already ahead as from day one, YES was a truly converged offering – everything is just data to us,” he said.