Red Hat: Reshaping India’s technology ecosystem

India’s enterprise technology ecosystem is transforming as generative AI, edge computing and 5G converge to redefine how businesses scale. Open-source platforms are emerging as the foundation of this shift, helping enterprises innovate responsibly with greater flexibility and transparency. In an interview with tele.net, Abhishek Shukla, Senior Director and Head, Enterprise Sales, India and South Asia, Red Hat, discusses how open-source ecosystems are driving collaboration, accelerating AI adoption, and shaping the next phase of enterprise and telecom growth, as well as the role of Red Hat in this transformation. Edited excerpts from the interview…

How do you see GenAI transforming enterprise operations? How is Red Hat supporting this transformation?

GenAI has become a global phenomenon. Enterprises are focusing on two main objectives – generating revenue and optimising costs. Most investments today are directed towards improving productivity, both in people and processes, through automation, documentation and hyper-personalisation. Red Hat’s approach to AI mirrors what it achieved earlier in the telecom industry with network function virtualisation – that is, democratisation. With OpenShift AI, Red Hat provides an open AI/ML operations platform. It allows developers and ecosystem players to build, train and deploy AI applications flexibly, with the freedom to choose any large language model or hardware accelerator. This open approach ensures that enterprises are not locked into proprietary black-box architectures and can scale AI adoption responsibly with full transparency and choice.

What are the key challenges in adoption of disaggregation and open platforms in telecom?

Initially, there was hesitation among customers. Many preferred the convenience of a single-vendor model. Red Hat had to drive awareness and demonstrate the benefits of open architectures, not just commercially, but operationally and culturally. The transition from “telco to techco” requires a shift in mindset, processes and skills. Red Hat worked closely with telecom operators to show how open ecosystems foster innovation, flexibility and long-term value. Over time, this mindset has evolved, and disaggregation has become a key pillar of transformation across the telecom industry.

What role is Red Hat playing in improving the efficiency of AI workloads?

Our inferencing server optimises the process through which AI models generate insights from data by reducing GPU usage and improving resource efficiency. The company provides optimised, quantised LLMs as part of its catalogue, allowing customers to deploy high-performing models that use up to four times fewer resources compared to general open AI models. This combination of optimisation techniques and pre-tuned models helps enterprises maximise performance while lowering operational costs in AI-driven environments.

How is Red Hat assisting service providers and enterprises in building intelligent, self-healing, and secure infrastructure?

The company provides a unified layer where applications, automation and networking converge. This enables efficient orchestration across hybrid environments, whether workloads reside at the edge, in the core or on public cloud. Our OpenShift platform supports cloud-native, AI and automation workloads on a single, consistent framework, thus simplifying management and ensuring consistent performance, scalability and security. It also supports autonomous networking by harmonising policy management and orchestration across multiple applications and environments.

Technologies such as 5G, cloud, edge computing and AI must be viewed as enablers rather than standalone innovations. Their real potential lies in integration. When unified, these technologies can help telecom providers evolve into digital marketplaces, where independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers and AI solution providers collaborate to build new use cases.

Across various sectors, where do you see the strongest traction for enterprise 5G adoption?

Adoption of enterprise 5G is still in its early stages, particularly in India, largely due to legacy infrastructure. However, as digital transformation accelerates, 5G, combined with AI, will act as the catalyst to unlock new use cases across industries. Red Hat continues to play a central role in this regard by providing a unified platform that enables collaboration and innovation across ecosystems.

What are your views on private 5G promoting more use cases across industries?

Private 5G offers an alternative to Wi-Fi in industrial settings, delivering higher reliability, lower latency and greater security. As factories adopt automation technologies such as autonomous guided vehicles and connected devices, private 5G will become essential to ensure seamless connectivity. It will serve as the backbone for Industry 4.0, enabling enterprises to build fully automated, intelligent and secure industrial networks.