We bridge gap between open-source innovation and enterprise-readiness: Red Hat’s Ameeta Roy

US-based open source enterprise software solutions firm Red Hat has been present in India for over 20 years, with offices in Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, and Delhi. The India operations play a dual role: serving as a global hub for engineering and support, while also directly engaging with customers across South Asia.

Over the past two decades in the country, Red Hat has customers across industries here. India’s financial services sector is a significant example. Several leading banks, including RBL Bank, Yes Bank, and Bank of India, rely on Red Hat OpenShift to support UPI-based services. Stock exchanges such as MCX also run on Red Hat platforms, says Ameeta Roy, Senior Director - Solution Architecture and Adoption for the APAC region, in an interview with TechCircle.

Beyond private enterprises, Red Hat is also emerging as a natural partner for several digital projects by the government. “India’s taxation network, the railway passenger reservation system, and even railway locomotives run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Real-time information systems that track train locations and schedules also use our technologies,” said Roy.

Notably, the Indian government in 2015 launched a framework for the adoption of open source software in e-governance systems. “The Government of India has also been a strong supporter of open source. In fact, many RFPs explicitly mandate the use of open source to avoid vendor lock-in. For government projects, long-term stability and life-cycle support are critical. They cannot afford to change systems overnight; often, RFPs specify support requirements of five, seven, or even ten years,” said Roy.

Community-driven open source moves too quickly—projects update every few weeks or months, making it nearly impossible to maintain the required n-2 version compliance, she further noted.

Red Hat delivers stable and curated versions of software with extended life-cycle support. It allows customers, including government agencies, to ward off worry about a piece of software becoming outdated too quickly.

Gearing up for AI era

Looking ahead to the AI era, Red Hat is extending the same principle. “Customers should have the freedom to choose whichever AI models or accelerators work best for them, whether it is Google’s TPUs, NVIDIA’s GPUs, or others. Our open-source, subscription-based model ensures they can adopt these technologies without being locked into proprietary layers,” said Roy.

Red Hat takes community-driven open-source projects and makes them enterprise-grade: by offering security, guaranteeing integrations, and validating them with the ecosystem. “This way, customers get the best of both worlds – rapid innovation from open source, with the stability, security, and long-term support required for enterprise environments.”

For instance, Red Hat recently launched Red Hat AI Inference Server, built on the open-source vLLM project from UC Berkeley. It is an enterprise-grade solution designed for scalable deployment of AI models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), for inference tasks. “We have strengthened this further with capabilities from Neural Magic, a company deeply involved in vLLM and recently acquired, which is now part of Red Hat,” Roy added. Red Hat acquired the AI optimisation platform in November 2024.

Further, the company is also investing in LLM-D, a new open-source project extending inference to distributed, hybrid cloud environments by combining vLLM innovation with Kubernetes orchestration.

Corporate-backed open source ecosystem

Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion, in what remains one of the largest software deals in history. While it operates as an independent subsidiary, the acquisition sparked debates about the role of large corporations in shaping open-source ecosystems. Red Hat’s flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is an enterprise-grade distribution of the open-source Linux operating system.

RHEL is built on upstream community projects such as Fedora (a fast-moving innovation hub) and CentOS Stream (a rolling preview of what’s next in RHEL). The model allows Red Hat to balance innovation with stability, offering customers a hardened, fully supported distribution with long-term lifecycle commitments. Beyond RHEL, Red Hat has become a leader in hybrid cloud and Kubernetes-based platforms, with Red Hat OpenShift now a core growth driver under IBM, extending the company’s influence well beyond Linux into AI, cloud, and container orchestration.

Beyond criticism, Red Hat helps in the upkeep and maintenance of open source enterprise systems, something which is a challenging proposition for many firms today to do on their own.

“Red Hat still maintains its independent identity within IBM. Open-source communities excel at rapid innovation, but enterprises often need stability and risk mitigation when adopting these technologies. That is where Red Hat plays a crucial role. We bridge the gap between raw open-source innovation and enterprise-readiness. This way, customers benefit from the latest innovations while relying on a stable, supported platform,” Roy said.