India hub for IBM's Linux initiatives

NEW DELHI: With a large addressable market like India, IT major IBM is gearing up to make the country a hub for its Linux initiatives in the Asean region, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.
"From the Asean perspective India is seen as a hub and a lot of investment is being put into India. In fact IBM (India) is geared up to serve as a hub already as a number of these Indian centres support the rest of Asean, too," Sandeep Menon, Linux business manager, IBM Asean/SA, said on the side lines of the ongoing Linux Asia event.
Worldwide IBM had 250 people exclusively working on R&D in Linux kernel, open source key technologies, he said, adding of this 250 people, who were virtually spread across the world, 30 people were in Bangalore Linux Technology Centre.
"In Indian centres, a lot of work is happening in specific areas like carrier grade Linux targeting telecom companies, embedded Linux, wireless Linux projects," he said.
"And as the service requirement in Linux pumps up, India is going to very rapidly ramp up and take advantage of the outsourcing and software projects that now moving in the Linux space."
That would be a big business opportunity for Linux in India, Menon said.
"We are also seeing a lot of desktop deployments in India. India is not a server-led Linux market. IBM itself has Linux desktop option and IBM Linux desktops are running in the last three quarters in the country. It is doing "very, very high numbers" with the buyers coming from a lot of PSUs, financial institutions, software companies, SMBs," Menon said.
The roadmap ahead was that the Linux desktop market was going to increase substantially, he said.
"It is increasingly picking up. The demand for Linux-based desktops will come from government, financial services companies and the SMBs space."
IBM has a porting centre that is designed to support ISVs and people who want to port and certify their applications.
The Linux Solutions Centre does benchmarking, proof of concept. There is an e-business solution centre in Gurgaon, which has Linux as one of its key pillars.
The IBM Research Labs in IIT Delhi is also involved in a number of futurisitic research on Linux.
Menon did not give the total strength of IBM''s India employees working on Linux "as the number of people are cross functional, so cannot be enumerated".
"Linux over a period of time is business as usual. It runs on all the IBM products," he added.