Enterprises are pushing beyond AI pilots, but many are still grappling with the basics of running models securely and reliably across mixed environments that include public cloud, on-prem systems and sites that operate without direct internet connectivity.
Navtez Singh Bal, Vice President and General Manager for India and South Asia at Red Hat, said the next phase will depend on hybrid operating models that keep data, accelerators and critical systems where they are, alongside tighter alignment between software and hardware accelerators, AI tooling embedded into platforms developers already use and more automation as AI-infused applications and agent-driven workflows expand, in an interview with TechObserver.in’s Mohd Ujaley.
“AI will be open source and the cloud will be at the core of the AI transformation,” Bal said, outlining how organisations with older, monolithic applications can modernise incrementally, particularly in regulated and disconnected deployments such as banking, telecoms and critical infrastructure.
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Edited excerpts:
AI is drawing intense interest. Many see open source and the cloud as core building blocks. What is Red Hat changing in its product stack, and what is new in your approach?
AI will be open source and the cloud will be at the core of the AI transformation. More so in India than any other place because we are very frugal in the way we deploy capital. From our side, there are two or three things I can talk about.
The first is much better integration between our software and hardware providers like NVIDIA, so that on day zero itself you have an operating system that is optimised for that hardware. You do not want to spend a lot of money buying very expensive hardware and then realise that the rest of your IT systems do not really support it. That is wasteful expenditure. So you will see a push from our side on closely aligning our software with hardware accelerators.
Second, we are still at an early stage of AI deployment. People have been running pilots and working on use cases. But at the right stage of evolution, you have to have more scalable architectures. Your architectures are only scalable if your IT systems, IT operators and everybody can work on it in the same way they develop modern apps.
From that perspective, you will see AI-related tooling getting infused in OpenShift AI, which is our app modernisation and app development platform. The same platform will extend into AI itself. If you want to do an agentic AI implementation or you want to infuse AI into apps, you will find it within the same platform itself, so that you do not have to teach your developers new things. They can use a platform they know and learn new skills on the AI side, rather than retooling them on a brand new platform.
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The moment apps get AI infused and the moment agents start coming in, there is a lot of automation the agents will bring, IT automation. That is where Red Hat, through its Ansible platform, also plays.
Many organisations have legacy systems that are not Kubernetes-friendly or microservices-friendly. For large banks and other air-gapped organisations that have already invested heavily, what fundamental shift do you suggest for modernisation?
If you look at all the new apps getting developed, the majority of them are on the microservices architecture. So they are containerised and so on.
Even in legacy, roughly 30-40% of deployments have already modernised their applications. But there is a 60-70% installed base where people are following what they call the hollowing the core approach. They are taking modules and reorganising them around this microservices architecture.
When you have an enterprise like that, everything cannot be built from scratch, absolutely brand new. A lot of our work is around making sure that even in such a set-up, where you have monolithic applications and data residing across multiple locations, our platform can cut across.
That is why OpenShift is a very important platform because it has the ability to straddle any infrastructure, any cloud and any type of application. Even if you have a monolithic application, you can lift and shift, put it into a virtual machine and run it inside the container.
You are now leading the India and South Asia business. What are your priorities over the next couple of years, across business, development and market outreach?
There are three or four priorities I have.
First, given where India is in its evolution and given the geopolitics, our sovereignty and control will play a very large part in the way we develop as a country. I fundamentally think open source has a role to play in this transformation. The most important piece for me is to make sure that we are at the core of this revolution, which will be India trying to be more sovereign and having much more control on its data, on its models and on its operating system.
India has also become one of our largest adopters of open source. So maintaining that open source primacy to solve for India’s problems is a big one.
Second, we have the potential to be a top five original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in the country. As adoption goes up, as companies adopt AI and as they become more modern in their applications, we have a role to play. So how do you become a relevant OEM at scale?
Third, getting India to contribute back to the open source community. If you look at our model, it starts with open source contribution, that then gets productised. India is one of the largest developer populations in the world. So how do you make sure they remain excited about these areas and contribute back? With our VLLMs, virtualised LLMs, or whatever you call them, India and China are at the forefront of adoption of this. Can we get our population, our young developers, excited about our products and get them to contribute?
The last priority is that India will be the largest and the most well-trained developer population in the world. So can we have more engineering being done out of India for our products, continue to grow India’s share in our overall Red Hat footprint on engineering.
How important is India to Red Hat’s revenue growth and engineering strategy, and what makes the market different?
You cannot doubt India’s revenue growth. The country itself is growing at 10% plus. That is real growth. You add nominal growth to it and you are already at 15% plus. So even if you have to hold market share in India, you have to grow at 15% plus. We are doing better than that because we are growing our market share. So I am not concerned about revenue. Revenue growth in India will happen.
What I want to focus on is that some of our customers, be it one of the banks, be it the airlines, be it the telcos, they are the largest in the world when it comes to usage. If our products and services can work there, then they can work in any country in the world, in any company.
I am very focused on making sure we have 15 to 20 big reference cases. That is how India becomes the centre of innovation for Red Hat. Take an HDFC Bank or the scale of an SBI or the scale of Jio. If you are able to serve them and serve them well, there is no reason why you should not be able to serve Chase or Citibank.
If you are running India’s payment internet, you are doing more than what the big payment companies are doing. For me, India is that. We have to be relevant to the most important Indian institutions on their most important problems. If we do that, growth, profitability, people, everything is taken care of.
Which sectors do you see as having the strongest potential for adoption?
Regulated markets, whether it is banking and financial institutions, whether it is transportation and logistics or whether it is telco. These are doing very well. The hunger to modernise is very high. They have to modernise because they have to serve a billion plus population with the kind of service-level agreements (SLAs) we have.
Of late, we are also seeing a lot of pull from manufacturing and healthcare. They are beginning to wake up and say, listen, I have lots of data residing at the edge, within the plants, in my operations. How are we going to use these technologies and get the benefit of business outcomes?
Globally, tariffs are creating uncertainty and there is uncertainty around trade relationships and so on. Everybody has to be on the leftmost part of the cost curve. So there is a desire and push to make sure cost reduction keeps happening, to tap more and more productivity. Hence, there is a lot of demand from manufacturing and healthcare also coming in.
On manufacturing, CISOs and CIOs often point to the challenge of connecting IT with older OT systems at the edge, running business-critical workloads. There is interest in AI and IT-OT convergence, but also apprehension driven by security and operational risk. What comfort can Red Hat provide at the architecture layer?
Basically, what are the few things you want? You want to make sure that when you want to disconnect from the external internet, you can do it. You want to make sure that sometimes your data, which is being used to train models or fine-tune models, remains inside, it does not leak into the node.
You want to make sure that there are some governance aspects from a health and safety perspective which are built in, so that you are not taking a black box and then depending too much on it on applications which have health, safety and environment (HSE) issues. And you want safety. You do not want to be dependent on somebody else to take away control, that tomorrow a system gets shut down and you are out of, you are not working anymore.
All of this requires a mode which we call hybrid mode, which means that your data can be where it is, your accelerators can be where they are and your IT systems can be where they are. A lot of innovation is going on in making sure things work in this environment. That is why some of our work in disconnected environments is quite powerful.
Our work with some Indian sovereign AI providers has been strong. The question is how you build one open source architecture that can span on-prem and cloud and bring together legacy IT and modern IT. That is what Red Hat does and that is where we are focused.
