Video: 10 minute IT Jams - An update from Red Hat

Companies across Australia and New Zealand are racing to adapt to rapid technological change. For Red Hat, an open source software leader, the past several months have also marked a period of transformation and focus.

Enzo Campagnoni, Regional Vice President and General Manager for Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand, has been at the centre of this evolution. Having taken the helm just over half a year ago, Campagnoni spoke candidly about both the opportunities and pressures facing local businesses - and how Red Hat is responding.

"We are a company that has delivered over time hardened open source solutions," Campagnoni said, referencing Red Hat's long history pioneering enterprise software built on open source principles. "A lot of your listeners would probably know us from the early days of when we revolutionised the operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux." That flagship product, widely dubbed RHEL or "Rel", remains a core foundational platform, "certified on all the major clouds and with thousands of hardware and software vendors," he added.

But Red Hat's offerings and focus have grown well beyond operating systems. "We kind of focus on three key main areas really. We've got hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native applications, and automation and orchestration solutions," Campagnoni explained. He positioned Red Hat as a trusted provider of robust platforms in each of these spaces, adding, "We deliver robust platforms in all three of those areas to help our customers solve key business problems."

At the heart of Red Hat's approach is embracing the innovation that stems from open source communities while making those solutions fit for enterprise-scale adoption. "What hasn't changed and we've been doing for a long time is we still harness the innovative power of open source, but deliver in a way that's enterprise-ready for our customers," Campagnoni said. "Hardening, making it ready to consume at the scale that most of our customers do."

He argued that much of today's technological and business innovation is rooted in open source foundations. "A lot of the main sources of innovation have really come from the open source community over recent years - both in technology innovation and business innovation," he said. "Customers are leveraging the benefits of those open source platforms so they can focus on what they do best, which is all of the innovation on top of those platforms."

Asked about his first months leading the company locally, Campagnoni was frank about the challenges but upbeat. "The last six months have been pretty intense," he said. "But they've been fantastic. I've had a real chance to get a much deeper understanding of both internally the Red Hat business across the board, but more importantly, spending a lot of time with our customers and partners."

He has been travelling extensively, meeting customers from across Australia and New Zealand and hearing firsthand the rapidly shifting expectations they face. "They're dealing with a lot of conflicting challenges," he said, rattling off issues including increased complexity, changing market dynamics, inflation, cost pressures, and an acute technology skills gap. "Especially in Australia, where we had the borders closed for so long, it just exacerbated an existing problem that we already had," Campagnoni said.

Further complicating matters are stricter regulatory and compliance demands, all while organisations are also tasked with meeting sustainability targets and delivering "world best-in-class product and services to their customers".

In response, Campagnoni said Red Hat is striving to help organisations "leverage the open source technology and the innovation that it can provide" while reducing costs. "Helping them remain competitive, flexible and adaptable while really maintaining all the security and regulation compliance that they need to do," he said.

The rush to digitisation brought on by the pandemic has only accelerated investment. Citing recent forecasts, Campagnoni noted, "Australian enterprises are effectively looking to invest about 20 billion dollars in cloud computing technology by 2025, which is a massive growth in spend in that area."

Red Hat's advocacy for open hybrid cloud - allowing companies to operate seamlessly across public clouds, on-premises data centres and the network edge - puts the company in a strong position as these investments ramp up. "We've been talking about hybrid cloud for a lot longer than when it's now become much more popular," Campagnoni noted. He referenced industry research showing that hybrid cloud has become the most commonly used cloud strategy.

At its core, Campagnoni argued, what makes open hybrid cloud attractive is its flexibility. "At Red Hat we believe that an open hybrid cloud really provides the flexibility and openness that's needed for both the mix of different workloads and the changing business needs," he said.

For example, artificial intelligence workloads may need to operate close to a company's own data for performance or compliance reasons, while other tasks can be shifted to the public cloud as required. "Hybrid cloud is there to adapt to the needs of the business," Campagnoni said.

He illustrated with a customer example. Suncorp Group, a major financial services company, turned to Red Hat to modernise key applications using a hybrid architecture. As Suncorp's business strategy shifted, Red Hat helped them migrate from on-premises systems to cloud services, maintaining continuity and agility. "Hybrid allowed them to do that," Campagnoni said, highlighting how this delivered both application portability and cost contestability.

With the labour market under sustained pressure, Campagnoni sees automation as crucial for organisations determined to "do more with less". Automation, he explained, "becomes integral to cloud computing, especially with the challenges of trying to do more with less." Red Hat's Ansible platform is designed to help here, offering "an end-to-end platform to configure systems, deploy software and orchestrate advanced workloads," he explained.

The latest advance is event-driven Ansible, which integrates infrastructure and application monitoring. "In essence, event-driven Ansible is like that team member that basically never goes home. It augments your staff and intends to deliver that," Campagnoni said.

Red Hat's success, he emphasised, is inevitably tied to its ecosystem of partners - from global technology giants to highly specialised local firms. "We wouldn't be where we are today without our partner ecosystem. It's intrinsic in the way we've evolved as a company," he explained. These partners bring domain-specific expertise and help co-create powerful new solutions for customers across industries, including finance, healthcare, and telecommunications.

A recent partnership with Nokia exemplifies this approach, with staff from both companies working side by side to deliver new solutions for the emerging 5G era. "These are really intimate, comprehensive partnerships with a high degree of mutual commitment," he said.

In a rapidly changing world, Campagnoni believes Red Hat's commitment to open source values - collaboration, transparency, and community - gives it and its customers an advantage. "What we've seen, especially in the recent past, is that if it's taught us anything, it's that things can change really quickly," he said. "We're most successful when we really stay close to the relationships that matter most."