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Red Hat's Latin America business is growing and the IT firm aims to expand itsproduct portfolio and regional presence in 2022.

The companys regional focuses are financial services, the public sector, and telecommunications. And it is betting on artificial intelligence, with tests on a machine learning and artificial intelligence service already underway. Commercial launch is planned for next year.

In this interview, Red Hats Latin America technology director Thiago Araki also highlights the advance of open source solutions and plans for Central America and the Caribbean.

BNamericas: In which verticals are you seeing the greatest opportunities in Latin America?

Araki: In telecommunications, financial services and government. All of them are going through a moment of transformation.

Operators, with everything to do with the launch of 5G, are making investments to modernize their network. Financial services also, with this movement of fintech, changes in means of payment and open banking. And we see a transformation in government, which seeks to digitize and reduce bureaucracy.

BNamericas: These sectors you mention were reluctant to use open source for security reasons. Has this been resolved?

Araki: Yes, it is finished. I have been at Red Hat for eight years and when I entered, this discussion was taking place, but it is already being perceived that open software is safe. In addition, we have an open source business and offer support so that they can consume this type of technology safely.

Today, acquiring proprietary software and supported open source software is not very different for the company. What does change is that open source offers much more innovation.

BNamericas: How is Latin America doing in terms of open source adoption?

Araki: In general, here you first look at what's working globally and then it's just adopted, but once it's done, the level is comparable to other more mature markets.

BNamericas: And what about the adoption of containerized apps and the Kubernetes automating system?

Araki: That is a good example of what we are saying. These technologies have been in the market for about seven years. We started leading that community in 2014/15. In 2016, we saw the first large companies start adoption.

Today it is really very difficult to find a company that is not using containers and Kubernetes, either in their own datacenters or as a service in the cloud.

Adoption in Latin America is very large, and we have many success stories.

BNamericas: Open RAN and edge computing are emerging with much potential. How does Red Hat fit into these spaces?

Araki: We are among the main investors in open RAN and in edge computing.

We are working on a set of solutions designed for a more distributed model. So, for example, our RHEL OS we made lighter so it can run on the edge. We just released a version of OpenShift that you can now run on a single node, which is also very useful for edge computing.

And, very important are investments in automation tools because all the management of distributed processing is very complex.

BNamericas: What are the investment focuses for next year?

Araki: We are going to continue investing in these issues, but something new we are working on is everything related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are about to release a service called OpenShift Science.

We have been investing in open source communities dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence models for some time now, and now we are about to launch this service that aims to be simple so that data scientists or analysts can develop models without the need to be experts. We will continue with very strong investments in the next year.

BNamericas: IBM owns Red Hat and is very strong in AI. How to do plan to compete or complement each other?

Araki: With IBM we sometimes compete and sometimes we collaborate. The main objective of the Red Hat acquisition was to be able to scale what we were already doing and to be able to drive enterprise open source in the hybrid cloud. So, many times we go together combining technologies and in other cases what we do is compete.

Watson [IBM's AI proposition] is an incredible portfolio, but I think there are a lot of companies that want to adopt or are more used to open source. Then we'll be there.

I see a lot of demand for artificial intelligence across industries on credit card fraud detection, security, and, of course, the internet of things (IoT).

In telecommunications, also with the pandemic, we saw great interest in issues of efficient use of networks and their sizing. We have the ability to identify usage patterns and be able to make network configurations in advance.

BNamericas: Is the artificial intelligence portfolio commercially available?

Araki: At the moment it is in the testing phase. Customers can use it at no cost, because the idea is to carry out the tests in the market so that it can then be converted into an offer.

What we also want to do is that, through this service, solutions from companies that are part of the Red Hat ecosystem, such as IBM or startups, can be integrated.

BNamericas: Beyond the product portfolio, what investments is Red Hat making in the region?

Araki: Well, we continue to expand. We are hiring many people; we opened a commercial office in Peru, and despite the uncertainty, we see very important growth.

And this will continue next year. We are also expanding to other markets, where we have a smaller presence now, such as the Caribbean or Central America. There, the demand is increasing a lot.

In addition, we are working with business partners on their training.

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Red Hat bets on artificial intelligence and ... - BNamericas English