New Delhi, Dec. 10 -- For Vincent Caldeira, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Asia Pacific, Red Hat, India is no longer a stop on the APAC circuit - it is the beating heart of the open-source company's global engineering and its fastest-growing market in the region. "We host two of our main engineering centres here - Pune and Bangalore - and India is the fastest-growing market for us in APAC."
From powering a majority of India's UPI transactions to supporting digital infrastructure across public services and regulated industries, Red Hat's 25-year journey in India reflects the country's shift from a low-cost delivery hub to a strategic powerhouse influencing global software direction.
On what sets India apart, Caldeira believes that the region today is not just a domestic market for Red Hat - it is a technology supplier to the world. "Many of our customers in APAC - Australia, Singapore, Japan - and even large American enterprises run massive volumes of IT delivery out of India. The country is both a high-growth end-user market and a global source of trained engineering talent." Differentiating in a crowded cloud market
As India accelerates the adoption of hybrid cloud and open-source infrastructure, competition intensifies. Yet Caldeira argues Red Hat's differentiation lies in choice - not lock-in.
"We don't believe the future belongs to a single cloud," he says, pointing to a three-tier consumption pattern emerging in India - hyperscalers for scale, private cloud for sensitive workloads, and domestic sovereign cloud providers for compliance-heavy sectors that cannot support their own data centres.
Sovereign cloud - particularly relevant post data protection mandates - is a market Red Hat believes India will shape globally. "Many mid-size organisations don't have the financial strength to build a private cloud, but they need regulatory compliance. Domestic providers offering hyperscaler-like capability while keeping data local - this is growing fast in India."
Beyond BFSI & telcos: Railways, hospitals and public infra
If the first phase of Red Hat's India story was driven by banking and telecom, the next phase is defined by healthcare, transport, and public services. Indian Railways uses Red Hat technology across its AI platform. Manipal Health, Caldeira notes, exemplifies how infrastructure uniformity can support rapid expansion. "They grew significantly in their number of hospitals and beds. Behind that growth, they needed infrastructure that scales without linearly increasing cost."
The company's pitch to mid-market and fast-scaling enterprises hinges on ROI - the real cost is not software, Caldeira asserts, but maintaining systems for years. "You must taper the cost of tech operations over time - that's where open source wins."
India now a global engineering hub
Red Hat does not usually disclose regional R&D splits, but Caldeira confirms India now contributes close to 50% of its global engineering workforce. Pune and Bengaluru are two of Red Hat's three global engineering centres - the third sits in China.
Unlike traditional tech firms that run R&D as closed centres of excellence, Red Hat's India engineers contribute to community-driven, upstream open-source projects, shaping standards for containers, Kubernetes, AI and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem alongside Microsoft, Google and others.
"We invest not just in engineering, but talent development and long-term site leadership. India is not a cost centre - it is where future platform engineering will come from."
Kubernetes - Essential for AI
Some Indian mid-size firms have begun rethinking Kubernetes costs. Caldeira calls abandoning it "a losing game." He points to a blind spot: companies that buy GPUs but don't orchestrate workloads properly average 20% GPU utilisation. "You're leaving 80% of multimillion-dollar GPU investment idle because you didn't want to invest a fraction of that in orchestration." Domestic cloud players, he notes, are emerging as Kubernetes-based GPU providers delivering AI infrastructure at a fraction of the hyperscaler cost.
Govt, AI policy and the rise of sovereign digital infrastructure
India's AI policy - including investment into compute, public datasets, and India-focused language models - is an area Red Hat is deeply engaged in. "What's happening in India is forward-looking - not just acquiring GPU capacity, but building the digital infrastructure around it. We're working with providers building sovereign cloud platforms that run disconnected or hybrid - including defence."
The next frontier
Red Hat sees two India-led frontiers emerging: first, Agentic AI - embedding AI functions into existing applications instead of building standalone AI products, and second, AI evaluation, that is, structured processes for testing and measuring the performance, accuracy, and reliability of AI systems- to ensure safety, trust and lifecycle monitoring of AI systems.
"Cost is the number one reason AI POCs fail. Trust is number two," Caldeira says. "We are engineering for AI evaluation across the lifecycle - supply chain, data, monitoring, and compliance."
As Red Hat completes two and a half decades in India, Caldeira hints that the milestone matters more than any product announcement. "Over 90% of India's digital payments run on our infrastructure. We've been building Indian digital infrastructure for decades. The next 25 years are about deepening that partnership," says Caldeira, stressing that for Red Hat, India is not just a market or an engineering base - it is the axis around which its open-source future will turn.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.