Pinoy leads Red Hat in emerging Asean nations

A stocky Filipino executive, Roman Tarre, is currently in charge of expanding Linux provider Red Hat’s presence in the Philippines and three other neighboring countries. Tarre, who was formerly with database vendor Oracle, has also been given the task of increasing the open source firm’s footprint in Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. The four economies, classified as developing economies, are under the Asean umbrella headed by Singaporean Patrick Lim. Two other Asean countries – Malaysia and Singapore – have their respective country managers. Although Tarre oversees the Philippines, the executive closely coordinates with IT distributor MSI-ECS which represents Red Hat in the country. MSI-ECS also provides on-site services and technical support for local clients, who are mostly large enterprises. Tarre and Lim, who were recently in the country for a technology forum, said in a media roundtable that the open source adoption in the country still has a big room for growth although a number top companies have already embraced open source for their software needs. Lim, in fact, has given Tarre a growth target of 200 percent for this year, which the Filipino executive playfully acknowledged as achievable. In the forum, its biggest yet in the country in terms of attendance, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company’s flagship operating platform. Incorporating software technologies developed by Red Hat, its partners and the open source community over the past three years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers new features that span the product. Enhancements range from kernel improvements for resource management, RAS, performance, scalability, virtualization and power saving, through a greatly extended and standards-compliant development environment, to a comprehensive range of updated server and desktop applications. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to be as “future proof" as possible, optimizing the capabilities of hardware from partners such as AMD, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel and NEC. At the same time, Red Hat announced a new base-level certification that will allow system administrators to validate their ability to perform the key tasks required of Red Hat Enterprise Linux system administrators in today’s IT environments. The new certification, Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), will replace Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) with the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat also announced that it has restructured its training curriculum by implementing an interactive and facilitative teaching approach, and will offer distinct training paths that are more tightly aligned with today’s IT job roles and tasks. — Newsbytes.ph