(Picture source: Panoramic Vision)
Economic Observer Reporter Chen Yifan Do you know Red Hat? Nine out of ten will probably answer "I don't know", even if the company's market value has exceeded US$28 billion. Since its listing, the company's stock price has continued to climb and is currently at a historical high.
But just ask a few programmers, if nothing unexpected happens, they will tell you "This is the giant of open source code", "It is the banner and benchmark of open source enterprises"...
The name of Red Hat comes from the red hat of Cornell University lacrosse that its founder Marc Ewing wore while studying at Carnegie Mellon University . In 1994, he created his own Linux distribution, named Red Hat Linux. In 1995, Bob Young, founder of mail-order company ACC, acquired Marc Ewing's company, and the two merged to form Red Hat Software. Red Hat was launched in 1999. Today, Red Hat’s market value is nearly US$30 billion.
"Embraise open source, this is a completely open enterprise, and competitors are our partners." This is the new president of Red Hat China and the global vice president of Red Hat Cao Hengkang 's understanding of Red Hat.
On the 8th floor of Building A, Qiaofufang Grassland, No. 9, East Bridge, Chaoyang District, , Cao Hengkang accepted an exclusive interview with a reporter from the Economic Observer. This North Carolina-based company incorporates many Chinese elements in its office in Beijing, not just the "Great Wall", but the conference rooms are almost all named after the ancient sites of Beijing, such as "Forbidden City", "Summer Palace", "Tao Tian"...
black-framed glasses, clean and neat but not rigid, wearing a blue suit, and a handkerchief on blue background and white dots in her shirt pocket. This new president of Red Hat China, born in Taipei, calls him "Victor". He admires Jobs because "Steven Jobs insists on innovation, perfect products, and pursues the ultimate customer experience."
open to "disorder" enterprise
"I think your idea is terrible, so I don't care about it." This is what a Red Hat employee said to Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat. This incident was later written by Jim in his book "Open Organization".
The Red Hat where Cao Hengkang works is just as he said, a completely open enterprise, and even a little "disordered". Here, the CEO will personally reply to each employee's email, and employees can refuse their bosses and argue with them, and their positions are useless. The decision-making power depends on your influence among colleagues in the company. "Best ideas win."
They do not need to punch in to work, and the function of the work card is limited to swiping the access control of office buildings. The partition between the desks is very short, probably only the height of a bottle of canned Sprite. "Why do we need such a high partition? We need to communicate!" said the Red Hat employee.
A Red Hat technical architect Jon Masters completed his keynote speech on a bicycle at a Red Hat Summit across the industry. The computer server he used to deliver power from the bicycle.
has a large E-mail discussion group, and different discussions are circulated among employees every day, and everyone can post new topics.
"I like Red Hat's corporate culture very much. This is also my own personality, transparent and open." Cao Hengkang said that now in his time management, he must arrange chat time. The assistant will notify employees how much time Victor has to be open, and employees from different departments can communicate with him at this time. The Human Resources Department has a proposition called "Ask Victor", which means that Victor can be asked for any question. “The more open and transparent the decision-making process, the sooner it can effectively turn these ideas into practical processes where everyone is actively involved,” said CEO Jim.
"The management model of Red Hat is more inclined to the 'Athenian political system' model advocated by the ancient Athenians." CEO Jim summed it up in his book. "Everyone in our corporate culture is an elite. The concepts and ideas that anyone proposes have nothing to do with your title and position. You may be a low-level engineer, but as long as the idea is good, I will use your stuff instead of 'The boss's idea is the best.'" Cao Hengkang added.
"Disordered environments may seem terrible at first, but after a while, you will find this vibrant environment that is really exciting." Masters, the technical architect of Red Hat who completed his speech on a bicycle, once expressed his feelings for the "disordered" enterprise in this way. Can you make money by selling
?
In addition to the "disorderly" management method and corporate culture, what makes the outside world curious is Red Hat's business model.
"For example, a laboratory built a car that can be used to install wheels and steering wheel, but it doesn't know how safe it is or how many passengers it can carry. Red Hat is like a safe and high-performance "car" that drives and moves right away, and is realized through Red Hat's enterprise-level software. The paid part is the added value." Cao Hengkang gave an example of this business model.
"Red Hat actually adds value to free code," said Jim, who also wrote a special article explaining how Red Hat earns billions of dollars by selling free software. In 2012, Red Hat became the first open source company with revenue of $1 billion.
"We initially became famous in the industry because of our cooperation with the Linux operating system, the most widely used software technology in the entire computer industry. Now our cooperation extends to other open source communities, such as OpenStack, JBoss, GlusterFS and A-pache Camel." In the article, Jim emphasized, "What we sell to customers is the most stable and secure complete system on the planet, and they are willing to pay for it." The business model of
Red Hat has been a bit of effort in sales promotion in the Chinese market. Domestic customers are accustomed to equating "open source" with "free", and they need to give more explanations in this regard.
However, Cao Hengkang also said that users can understand that they are selling a paid open source software. Free has two meanings in English: free and free.
In layman's terms, Red Hat's model is that customers can make any modifications to the code of open source products. Suppose that customers use Red Hat’s subscription service this year, and if they don’t want to subscribe in the second year, they can cancel it. When they want to subscribe, they don’t need to make up for the previous money, and their freedom is very high. "The concept of open source is open, and they are very beneficial for the digital transformation of into by enterprises." To date, Red Hat's products cover five major areas: cloud computing , storage, virtualization, middleware and operating systems, and fully support the development of enterprise IT.
days ago, Red Hat Company (NYSE: RHT) released its fourth quarter and full-year financial report for fiscal year 2018, with a report deadline of February 28, 2018. According to the financial report, its total revenue in the fourth quarter was US$772 million, an increase of 23% over the same period last year; the total revenue for the whole year was US$2.9 billion, an increase of 21% over the same period last year. Among them, infrastructure-related (mainly referring to Red Hat Enterprise Linux), as well as application development and other emerging technologies (Red Hat Open-Shift container platform, etc.), these two major areas are growing rapidly. The number of large-scale orders hit a new high, with 373 orders with transaction volumes of more than $1 million, including 54 for more than $5 million.
Nowadays, more and more enterprises no longer purchase servers separately, but choose to purchase public cloud services such as Amazon's AWS, , Microsoft , Windows Azure, etc. In the view of CEO Jim Whitehurst, many cloud computing services use Red Hat-based Linux solutions, which will benefit Red Hat as many customers choose cloud computing technology as their future IT operations direction. Moreover, Amazon is also a partner of Red Hat.
"Many people's understanding of Red Hat is still only at the so-called 'OS (open source operating system)' company. In fact, Red Hat has entered another realm." Cao Hengkang said that Red Hat's rapid growth products in recent years have more come from cloud platforms and other aspects. Our technology has already leapfrogged, and some technologies are gradually being used by Chinese customers, gradually crossing the gap. For example, in China, many enterprise users use the OpenStack and OpenShift platforms of Red Hat Cloud computing, which are the so-called hybrid cloud platforms. "In the past two years, Red Hat has actually gradually begun to build this ladder, so this is our own change in the past."
Red Hat's China Opportunities
Cao Hengkang talks about his fate with the mainland, and it can be traced back to reform and opening up.He had just left IBM and joined the American company AspenTech and came to China as the first chief representative of China. Cao Hengkang recalled that the desire for the latest foreign technology at that time was like a "sponge". During that time, he often went to Daqing and Lanzhou with his leather bag alone, where transportation conditions were very poor at that time. But nowadays, Chinese customers are no longer so curious about foreign technology applications. On the contrary, they value the inspiration of domestic success stories to them.
As a foreign-funded company, Red Hat's attention is the opportunity that is China's independent controllable and cloud computing market with rapid development. "Actually, I often feel that independence and control should not be equated with domestic assets and foreign capital. As long as you can achieve independence, controllability and security, this thing does not depend on the products from which country it comes from. Red Hat is a global company because my customers are global."
. In the software itself, Red Hat has the transparency, openness, security and controllability characteristics that Red Hat has just met China's current requirements for independence and controllability. "When an enterprise user gets this software, he can see what the underlying code of the software is, whether there are backdoors and security vulnerabilities, which are all independent and controllable." Cao Hengkang believes that Red Hat is consistent with the progress of the entire trend in China.
In the Chinese cloud computing market, Red Hat has more and more Chinese customers, covering all major industries and fields. This can be seen from the Red Hat Asia Pacific Innovation Award.
Since the founding of the Red Hat Asia-Pacific Innovation Award in 2011, Red Hat has witnessed more and more enterprise users in the Asia-Pacific region using open source solutions to achieve continuous innovation. Open source has become a technology choice, and enterprise users use it to transform IT infrastructure while accelerating the pace of digital transformation.
2017 winners include China Welfare Lottery Issuance and Management Center in Mainland China, China Mobile Research Institute, Wanda Network Technology Co., Ltd., China Foreign Exchange Trading Center-Zhonghui Information Technology, Yunnan Power Grid Co., Ltd. Information Center and Ping An Technology, Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong, and Yushan Bank in Taiwan.
2016 Red Hat Asia Pacific Innovation Award Winners: Lenovo , Capital Online, ZTEZTE, Industry Bank , (Taiwan) China Life Insurance, Taiwan Inert Tak and Hong Kong CargoSmart (affiliated with OOCL).
2015 award-winning companies include PetroChina Group, Bank of China , Huawei , Shenzhen Stock Exchange and China Merchants Bank . Cao Hengkang said: "You can see that the award-winning customers not only cover the fields of finance, aviation and government, but they all adopt cloud solutions, and they are all new products and solutions combinations."
On October 12, 2017, Alibaba Cloud joined the Red Hat Cloud Computing and Service Provider Certification (CCSP) program. In the future, Alibaba Cloud customers will be able to directly adopt Red Hat solutions and make full use of the advantages and full value brought by Red Hat’s diverse open cloud solutions portfolio. Alibaba Cloud plans to provide Red Hat's enterprise version of Linux in the Alibaba Cloud international cloud platform in the payment-as-you-can-eat model.
, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud's international business, Wang Yeming, once told the media: "As China and global enterprises increasingly modernize their application environment, Red Hat's full-life cycle solution on Alibaba Cloud will provide customers with higher flexibility and agility. We look forward to working with Red Hat to help corporate customers expand their cloud work to Alibaba Cloud."
, as the commander of Red Hat China, Cao Hengkang summarized three "Ps" to express his promotion of Red Hat's work in the future. "The first P is personnel, People. How to make existing company personnel constantly improve and continuously introduce more talents from the outside? As long as the talents are found correctly, things will be done. The second P is Process, which means that the company's processes and methods are more optimized, making the company more efficient, more standardized, and more productive. The third P is Partner, which is the so-called ecological chain. We need to have more partners. As with existing partners, we must make them have a deeper understanding of Red Hat, build a richer open source ecosystem, and expand the open source business together."
