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Linux in India: Red Flag Takes on Red Hat

Linux in India: Red Flag Takes on Red Hat

Red Flag's desktop release 4.0 is about to go head-to-head against Red Hat in the Indian Linux market.

That's the story being reported by Hinesh Jethwani from Mumbai in CXO Today.

"Red Hat’s monopolistic hold on the Indian market, which has made the brand almost a synonym of sorts to the word ‘Linux’, is all set to change with the entrance of new flavors into the Open Source market," writes Jethwani.

The company introducing Red Flag is Chennai-based Altosys Software Technologies Limited. The report quotes Altosys's L. Ramesh, business manager for Linux:

"Red Flag will offer a complete range of Linux solutions starting from desktops to high end servers. All versions are currently in Chinese, and we're working on the English customization, for distribution in India.”

Ramesh goes on to explain that Red Hat, by its early entry into the Indian market, has gained a substantial market share, but that Altosys calculates what RH has got is a share of a still-emerging market.

"Linux is in fact gaining popularity and acceptance only now. So the market would actually grow at a greater pace than now and we intend to capitalize on the same," Ramesh adds.

"We would focus on providing user friendly Linux solutions at much more competitive prices," he continues. "Most important of all we would concentrate on after sales support. In fact, this would be the single largest parameter that would soon determine the leader in the Indian market and we are very hopeful that we would make substantial in roads with our support network. Our target is to capture 15% to 20% of the Linux market in the coming financial year."

Ramesh explains the difference between Red Flag and other flavors of Linux thus:

"The base kernel is the same. There's not much any one can do to that. It is the additional packages and the applications that would play a major difference. First and foremost we would give much wider hardware support and Easy GUI based installation."

His company will hopefully be bundling the software with various vendors, he explains. Altosys is speaking with vendors like LG, HCL, IBM, HP, Acer, and Samsung.

More Stories By Linux News Desk

SYS-CON's Linux News Desk gathers stories, analysis, and information from around the Linux world and synthesizes them into an easy to digest format for IT/IS managers and other business decision-makers.

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Most Recent Comments
Manojit Majumdar 04/08/04 08:32:41 AM EDT

Hi,

Red Hat has already decided to go out of promoting the desktop version and thelow end server version. Hence the competition will be with Suse and ELX Linux. ELX Linux is the first Indian linux distribution.

I would also like to inform Red Flag Linux that no software product sells based on features alone in India. Software sell on branding, availability across the country and the right kind of marketing and technical support. Apart from Tally we are yet to see any Indian brand name succeeding in the long run, hence hopefully Red Flag has got the right strategy and the requisite experience of launching less popular products and making them popular. Kindly note that so far only those software products have succeeded in India which are successful in USA.

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