New York stock exchange-listed enterprise open-source company Red Hat has seen the demand for its software and services steadily grow and will open a South African office, as this is a priority market, says Red Hat Europe, Middle East and Africa senior VP and GM Werner Knoblich.

The increase in cloud adoption has driven demand for enterprise-grade open-source services, software and support not only in South Africa, but also worldwide.

“The adoption of cloud computing and services is happening faster than we anticipated throughout the information technology (IT) industry. Further, about 80% of cloud systems are open source or Linux-based.”

Knoblich says another driver of demand for open-source capabilities is that many of the workloads in cloud services are new workloads, with only a small percentage of the workloads in cloud systems being moved out of companies’ existing data centres.

Thus, the new use-cases being generated represent new growth, rather than merely a shift from existing IT infrastructure systems, he adds.

“Linux is clearly dominant in the cloud services space, and one of the reasons why it continues to grow is because of the way open-source software is developed and used. South Africa might have been a late adopter of enterprise-grade open-source software, but we rarely get questions anymore about the use of open-source systems in enterprise environments.”

The monthly subscription model of Red Hat is proving robust, with more than 90% of clients renewing their subscriptions. Further, the company has achieved 20% growth over the past year, and 53 consecutive quarters of growth over the past 13 years.

“Our value addition and support is the reason our clients remain subscribers, and we must earn their custom every day. “This is also what I tell my teams.”

South Africa has large corporations, as well as a large number of small and medium- sized businesses, and Red Hat’s aim is to invest in its presence in South Africa to make its office and support services in the country self-sufficient as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Red Hat has made several acquisitions to boost its mobile capabilities. Acquiring Irish mobile back-end service company Feed Henry was especially strategic, as it enables Red Hat to provide open-source mobility application services and extend its middleware portfolio, making it more accessible for clients who are not traditional users of open-source systems.

“Traditionally, larger enterprises with extensive IT environments use Red Hat’s services, but this acquisition enables us to provide our services for smaller organisations. “So far, the acquisition is proving beneficial and we have signed new use-cases with existing customers and signed new, smaller customers,” Knoblich explains.

He concludes that Red Hat is focusing on efficiencies and mobile capabilities for different processes, thereby helping to streamline, automate and digitise client workloads.