India to be SE Asian hub for Linux

With a large addressable market like India, IT major IBM is gearing up to make the country a hub for its Linux initiatives in the South East Asian region, a senior company executive said on Wednesday.

"From the ASEAN perspective India is seen as a hub and a lot of investment is being put into India. In fact IBM (India) is geared up to serve as a hub already as a number of these Indian centres support the rest of ASEAN too," Sandeep Menon, (Linux business manager), IBM Asean/SA, said on the sidelines of the ongoing Linux Asia event.

Worldwide IBM had 250 people exclusively working on research and development in Linux kernel, open source key technologies, he said, adding of these 250 people, who are virtually spread across the world, 30 were in Bangalore Linux Technology Centre.

"In Indian centres, a lot of work is happening in specific areas like carrier grade Linux targeting telecom companies, embedded Linux and wireless Linux projects," he said.

"And as the service requirement in Linux pumps up, India is going to very rapidly ramp up and take advantage of the outsourcing and software projects that now move in the Linux space."

That would be a big business opportunity for Linux in India, Menon said.

"We are also seeing a lot of desktop deployments in India. India is not a server-led Linux market. IBM itself has Linux desktop option and IBM Linux desktops are running in the last three quarters in the country.

"It is doing "very very high numbers" with the buyers coming from a lot of public sector undertakings, financial institutions, software companies, and small and medium businesses," Menon said.

Menon said Linux desktop market was picking up increasingly. The demand for Linux-based desktops, according to him, would come from government, financial services companies and the SMBs space."

IBM has a porting centre that is designed to support ISVs and people who want to port and certify their applications.

Menon did not give the total strength of IBM's India employees working on Linux "as the number of people are cross functional, so cannot be enumerated".