As a journalist at iTnews:
Red Hat has launched a new engineering and support facility in Brisbane to sustain its expanding product line.
The new facility replaces Red Hat’s existing Brisbane premises, which served as its Asia-Pacific engineering and support headquarters for the past nine years.
According to Paul Gampe, who is the software vendor’s vice president of Engineering Services and Operations, Red Hat’s regional engineering and support business has grown over the past six months.
“We have increased staff in both engineering and support, so we are launching this new facility to accommodate for this expansion and scale for future growth,” he told iTnews.
The new facility accommodates approximately 110 staff and has created ‘a number’ of new positions, Gampe said.
Boasting an area of almost 1,500 square metres spread across multiple storeys, the new facility is triple the size of its predecessor and now is Red Hat’s largest engineering centre in the Asia-Pacific region.
“Many technology companies have moved their development and support functions from Australia to China and India,” Gampe said, noting that Red Hat has facilities in all three countries.
“But for Red Hat, the growth of these two economies has contributed to the expansion of our operations in Australia … Brisbane is the regional headquarters for Engineering in Asia.”
“Our Brisbane centre provides service and support to customers around the globe, with Australian and New Zealand customers benefiting further because support is available in their time zone,” he said.
Red Hat’s Asia Pacific engineering and support staff conduct software research and development, product engineering, project management and software engineering activities.
This includes core graphics engineering, and Red Hat’s main translation team, which is responsible for making products available in 13 languages including German, French, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese and Indonesian.
Gampe highlighted staffing and scaling Red Hat’s support organisation inline with its business growth as two core focus areas of the new headquarters.
“A number of significant announcements were made at the Red Hat Summit in June, particularly around open virtualisation and Linux Automation strategies,” he said.
“Hand-in-hand with these announcements, we’ve increased the local investment in ‘behind-the-scenes’ engineering functions as part of our commitment to these initiatives.”
The new centre was officially opened yesterday afternoon by the Honourable Desley Boyle, Queensland Minister for Tourism, Regional Development and Industry.
According to Gampe, Red Hat’s Queensland location was chosen nine years ago because of ‘overwhelming’ state government support through a Queensland Government grant, and the quality of local engineering talent.
To support and sustain local talent, and contribute to the open source community, Red Hat’s Brisbane engineering centre will drive several initiatives promoting open source innovation and collaboration.
This includes Red Hat’s ongoing sponsorship of Honours research students at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and a research collaboration with QUT that will investigate open source localisation.
