As the latest in a series of Red Hat initiatives, its President and CEO Jim Whitehurst released OSCI Malaysia with the intention to support Malaysian development in the open source environment as well as support its community. Citing collaborative innovation as factor, the initiative will focus on creating more open source solutions and enhancing skills available through partnerships with local software developers.

“OSCI plays an important role in building a vibrant open source community,” said Whitehurst. “Red Hat is strongly committed to community-based collaboration that leads to better, more secure solutions to benefit government and business users in Malaysia and across the region.”

Beginning with the implementation of the initiative is the inclusion of 60 local Independent Software Vendors (ISV) that currently cater for the deployment of software solutions for a wide range of industries. Through its curriculum, Red Hat intends to works with these ISVs in order to provide open source training in an effort to accelerate the development of skills. The distribution vendor is also currently in talks with MDec with the intention to make local ISVs more open-source capable.

OSCI has been released in China in late January 2008, and was followed subsequently by Singapore, India and Australia in April, September and October of the same year respectively.

After having been released in countries within the Asia-Pacific region, OSCI has borne witness to a pattern of encouraging growth. Announced in China in late January 2008, its number of affiliated ISVs has grown from 30 to 100 – a more than 300 percent growth. A similar trend has also been reported in Singapore, experiencing a 67 percent increase.

When asked why Red Hat chose to launch OSCI in Malaysia during this period, Mr. Whitehurst replied that the concept of enterprise open source was fairly new open source, even if the scene had been around for almost a decade. Citing that Red Hat doesn't sell software, but rather enterprise-class ecosystems, Daniel Ng, the Asia-Pacific Director of Marketing for Red Hat explained that the company didn't want to go into several different markets at once. Mr. Whitehurst also mentioned that if the company want to play a catalyst role in building a local Red Hat ecosystem, they'd have to get involved with it over a period of time, as opposed to a coming-and-going process.

Other than concentrating on the development and the retaining of open source skills, particularly when it comes to Malaysia's small-medium businesses (SMB), OSCI's itinerary will also be to be contain the outflow of revenue for the country, so that it would be used to develop locally-made business solutions.