As enterprises increasingly turn to AI to transform their operations, the need for scalable, secure, and hybrid-ready infrastructure is more critical than ever. Red Hat and NxtGen have joined forces to address these challenges by delivering robust hybrid AI solutions that work seamlessly across cloud, edge, and on-premise environments. In an exclusive and joint interaction with CRN India, Stefanie Chiras, Senior Vice President, Red Hat Partner Ecosystem Success and AS Rajgopal, CEO and Managing Director of NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies, explain how Red Hat is empowering partners to drive the hybrid AI strategy and the joint go-to-market strategy to take NxtGen’s SpeedCloud platform to enterprises across industries.
How is Red Hat and its partners driving business evolution, harnessing the power of AI to unlock unprecedented opportunities across hybrid cloud environments?
Chiras: Red Hat, being an open source and a platform company, has always been dependent upon the ecosystem. Our value is to bring choice to customers and that choice is delivered through our partners. So, the ecosystem has always been core to us.
In recent times, we have focused on offering what we call the ‘open hybrid cloud’, which is really about choice and flexibility with the confidence to bring open source into the enterprise and to be able to move workloads around.
In today’s era of AI, all the workloads are built for hybrid clouds. It is because AI follows the data, which could be either on-premises, at the edge, or in the public cloud. We believe that everything we have been building up on our open source platform and focusing on open hybrid cloud comes together in this world of AI. Further, open source will be a key differentiating factor for AI, as it drives innovation. And AI is probably the fastest innovation we have seen.
But to deliver AI to the customers takes a breadth of different partner types. And from an ecosystem point of view, that’s one of our most exciting things – whether it is partnership with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD for GPUs and silicon technologies or server manufacturers like Dell, HPE, and Lenovo. On the other hand, we have also partnered with the likes of NxtGen in order to get those AI capabilities into the hands of customers. And, in order to derive great value from AI, the enterprises are looking for partners to offer new model capabilities and help them create more and more use cases.
Any specific efforts being put to equip your partners deliver AI-enabled solutions and services to the enterprises?
Chiras: We are seeing partners build AI into their technologies and we have been focused on delivering it to the customers. We have a deep focus on how we enable the partners and bring our technology to where it needs to be accessible. If we look at our AI portfolio, we have RHEL AI (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI), which we announced in May this year, which is now being delivered together with our partners. For instance, RHEL AI is being delivered with Dell and Lenovo systems that go out with GPUs.
Recently, I met with a value added reseller partner, who is leveraging our InstructLab (an open source project for enhancing LLMs used in GenAI applications) in order to create models that they use as their IP to deliver differentiated value to customers. Right now as they build those models, they can also use OpenShift AI to lifecycle those models.
Our focus is to build AI capabilities in our platforms with RHEL AI, OpenShift AI, and Red Hat Lightspeed and putting these capabilities into the hands of partners. We supplement this by making sure our AI-enabled solutions and services are available from an OEM provider, service provider, cloud provider or a hyperscaler. And then it’s all about enablement and sharing the use cases.
As a key partner, NxtGen has launched a public cloud platform, SpeedCloud, which is powered by Red Hat. What’s the rationale behind leveraging Red Hat’s open source technologies to develop SpeedCloud? How is this poised to bring the required flexibility, scalability, and reliability to the platform? Don’t you think that NxtGen is a little late in coming up with a public cloud platform in the market?
Rajgopal: It’s a good question to ask. I don’t think we are a late entrant in the public cloud domain. We have been offering cloud services since 2013 and were delivering cloud on VMware platform. But what happened is that as we saw how our customers struggled with budgets, a lot of them were unable to even experiment, let alone take it to production because of cost parameters.
Another trend that we are seeing is that if you can’t afford public cloud, then repatriate to a private but I don’t think that’s the right way to do it because a public cloud does offer certain great benefits like scalability and no upfront costs. You just pay for the infrastructure. I think the key issue is the cost.
So, when we started working with the Red Hat India team, we built a platform on Red Hat OpenStack first. And we had a lot of use cases to test, as we have the experience of delivering services to more than 900 customers. With this, we created an enterprise-grade, ready-to-use public cloud built on OpenStack with the aim to solve the cost-related issues and retain the value that public cloud brings to the enterprises.
Subsequently, we started experimenting with OpenShift AI and after deploying it, we realised that the possibilities are too many because both your traditional as well as modern applications can co-exist together on a single platform. Hence, we added OpenShift into the OpenStack platform. So, SpeedCloud today offers both platforms, OpenStack – which is an established comprehensive model and OpenShift – a very agile model where both traditional and modern applications can co-exist.
SpeedCloud integrates Red Hat OpenStack Platform for more scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure and Red Hat OpenShift for more seamless container management. This powerful combination enables businesses to more easily deploy and manage cloud-native applications while delivering high performance, flexibility, and operational efficiency.
The platform also supports the execution of large AI models and microservices trained on internal data sources, resulting in powerful and accurate AI applications that prioritise data privacy and security. The platform is purpose-built to accelerate the development, deployment, and scalability of applications, making it an ideal choice for enterprises looking to harness the power of enterprise open-source technology without compromising performance or security.
Keeping the repatriation trend in mind, how easy or difficult is it for you to convince customers to stick to the public cloud or give them a choice of hybrid model?
Rajgopal: What we have experienced is that they are only challenges with a few sets of customers because everybody wants to save cost. There are certain applications which are closely intertwined with the proprietary platforms. Hence, it becomes very difficult to move it. But I think in reality most of the applications can be moved very quickly.
We also have support from Red Hat, wherein we can easily migrate workloads. If a customer is willing to enjoy the benefit of cost, then there is a little bit of a few months of pain that he goes through during the migration. But for the long term he gets into a modern and robust platform that provides the required scalability, flexibility, and reliability. Right now, we have got more than 300 customers on SpeedCloud.
In terms of go-to-market, what joint efforts are being put to take SpeedCloud deeper into the market?
Rajgopal: While the customers have the option of buying the services online, both NxtGen and Red Hat will propagate it together. Besides, we want to really empower ISVs to come on board and offer it to both our as well as their customers as an increased value. Here, we want to work with ISVs not just to look at opportunities that are there to offer new applications to the customers but how we can embed AI into those applications in some form or the other.
Chiras: I think attracting the ISVs is very important particularly in the India market. With the breadth of ISVs and startups coming in, giving them a place to have access to the customers is very critical to the success of SpeedCloud platform. And since SpeedCloud also provides access to innovation, our endeavour is to work closely with NxtGen to offer the same to the ISVs. Both the parties will also strive to ensure an enhanced customer experience while using the public cloud platform.
How upbeat is Red Hat about the overall market dynamics of public cloud and how are you willing to support partners like NxtGen in this endeavor?
Chiras: We have always been upbeat about hybrid cloud. However, we are witnessing a varied approach in the market. But having said that, we are really excited to see NxtGen’s focused effort to understand the market and the customer set that they are trying to cater to while solving their cost related issues. Without getting bothered about managing their own infrastructure, customers will also get access to innovation. At Red Hat, we really want to support this innovative platform, which combines enhanced performance and cost-efficiency, meeting the growing demands of businesses while maintaining data sovereignty and operational control.
Like born-in cloud partners or managed service providers, is the industry going to witness the influx of ‘born-in AI’ partners or managed AI providers?
Chiras: It’s too early to tell but we might see this trend. Clearly, we are seeing traditional partners get very quickly on-boarded into AI and incorporating AI into their technology directly. And we are working with such partners. We are seeing the spin-up of all sorts of new partners that are coming in.
We are revamping our focus on ISVs in order to make sure that as new ISVs come up, they test the market and we are able to support them right as they grow. Moreover, we will start to see new business models being created around AI as well. The rate and pace of the innovation we have seen around AI in the past two years is unprecedented and I think it’s going to touch every single partner profile partner engagement motion.
Since this is your first visit to the country and you would have interacted with key partners out here, what has been your key takeaway?
Chiras: I think being here in India reinforces from all of the partners that I’ve spoken to, the data generation capability that is happening here in India and the digitalisation of the economy is unprecedented. I think that’s leading to India stepping up and taking a real leadership role in the global stage around AI.
We see global consortiums around AI that India is stepping up to take the leadership role. That’s a big deal. I am truly inspired by the innovation, the focus and uniqueness of the Indian market. With our partners like NxtGen catering to the market, which is data-driven and digitalised, beyond what I see anywhere else in the globe.
