"Success of Linux does not depend on failure of Microsoft"

Ever since it emerged from the development casing, Linux was talked about.
Unfor-tunately, its adoption did not pick as expected and it was only during the
1990’s after Red Hat created its distri-bution for Linux that open source
started making inroad. The company’s 3A pro-gram–awareness, apprecia-tion
and adoption–certainly proved one of the key success factors that lead to wide
spread adoption of Linux today. In a tete-a-tete with Nisha Kurian of CyberMedia
News, Sachin Dabir, Head, Enterprise Sales, Red Hat India explained how Linux
emerged from being a push product to a pull product. Excerpts:

What is happening on the Linux front in India? Do we see a growing
acceptance here?

When Red Hat started ope-ration in India we were merely six people. Today,
we are a 46-people company. For the past two years we have been primarily
educating people here on the benefits and availability of Red Hat Linux in
India. The awareness towards open source is dra-matically growing, some-thing
that can be judged by the fact that the President of India APJ Abdul Kalam
him-self said that India should make use of open source. Today we are selling
12,000 servers per year in the coun-try. Some of the major proje-cts bagged by
us in the country comes from Haldia Dock Complex, Central Bank of India, LIC,
Madhya Pradesh Treasuries Department, In-dian Railways Catering and Tourism
Corporation, Kothak Bank… to name a few.

With the open source code and the software available at a lower price, don’t
you feel that Linux should have made even a faster penetration especially in the
home segment? Besides, the lower cost should have helped tackle piracy.

I can’t precisely comment on why this piracy is happen-ing, but I can
surely say that Linux is reaching homes, office and the government sectors in a
major way. This is where we find lower cost of ownership, lower TCO and hassle
free ope-ration. If you look into our product, a user working on Windows will
not find any difficulty in working on Linux. We reached this stage in two years
time whereas it took 15 years for Windows to reach where it is now. Though in
India we sold nearly two lakh desktops last year, we feel that in the home
segment it will take at least two years for us to make a real mark. But we are
growing at 100 percent and will continue to grow like that.

In that case when do you see Linux emerge as a real threat to Microsoft?

Our success doesn’t depend on their failure. But our model is to create
more user base, which in turn will help to increase the market. If Linux is
growing, it is helping to grow IT. We are currently working to strengthen the
ecosystem that delivers the solution. The government sector has shown great
amount of readiness to go with Linux. Their projects are large but have got
budget constraints. Even they are worried about security. Linux addresses all
these gaps and provides control, security and flexibility.

What are your plans for India?

Today, India is ready for Linux and we are highly opti-mistic. All the major
vendors and application vendors have their products certified on Linux, which
itself is witness that Linux is growing.