Red Hat believes sovereign AI will solve APAC’s data problems

‘Owning AI’ can help enterprises in regulated sectors manage strict data laws, security risks, says the team, and stay flexible with the business.

Red Hat is doubling down on its AI sovereignty strategy for customers in the Asia Pacific region, and believes ‘owning AI’, instead of renting it, may help enterprises overcome strict data laws and regulations and successfully deploy solutions.

“The way we look at sovereignty is essentially having the choice and control of three layers, which is the infrastructure, the data, and the operation,” said Vincent Caldeira, chief technology officer of APAC at Red Hat during a media briefing.

“Most of the time, if you forget to deal with one of the layers, you’re basically relinquishing control to a third party provider and essentially creating exposure that is probably not deemed desirable from a risk perspective, especially if you are in the financial services industry. Or it could be that you have domestic regulation that prevents you from even doing so in many cases.

“We have to work very closely with our customers to make sure we give them an opportunity to answer all the requirements across the stack.”

Besides enabling customers to better manage their data, Red Hat believes being able sovereign AI can safeguard enterprises from geopolitical shifts or changes in providers’ terms of service.

This is also how the vendor leans in with its partnerships strategy in APAC.

“We’ve got an existing vibrant ecosystem in our region ranging from ISVs, OEM partners, and GSIs — and sovereignty is a discussion with each and every one of them,” said Fytos Charalambidas, VP of technology sales, APAC at Red Hat.

“But I must call out also that the new partnerships are coming from accelerator providers.

“[Conversations with] our existing partners that have MSP type capability, provide cloud or on-prem services, or have a data center are around sovereignty. They’ve already got Red Hat running and it’s a transition from there for them to take control or add [new] features.”

The features being the latest updates and solutions announced at this year’s Red Hat Summit.

Hoping to stand out in AI-overwhelmed Asia

While many of the launches at the summit centered around AI, Red Hat remain focused on helping customers realize a genuine hybrid strategy and retain some level of flexibility with AI adoption.

“Many of the other AI solutions are strongly opinionated, don’t offer choice, and stick to particular pathways,” Charalambidas told CRN Asia. “We are quite flexible and we can provide options in and out and also prepare customers for what might be coming.

“So what we bring is the platform approach. Others bring AI models and AI tools, and there’s a disconnect between the platform and those tools, which causes a lot of the issues for customers.”

To support customers through their journey, Charalambidas and Daniel Aw, VP and general manager at Red Hat APAC, shared that they’re working on better enabling channel partners in ASEAN.

They’re aiming to invest more on headcount and specialization around products for distributors, resellers, ISVs, and OEM partners here.

Aw added that channel partners remain integral to Red Hat’s overall strategy and are still part of the vendor’s annual sales kick-off, which is typically held in January.

“During sales kick-off we have many sessions where we go deep into some of the solutions enablement and technical training as well as sales training for our channel partners,” said Aw.

“[We] are committed to ASEAN and also our channel partners because they are really important. We are going to focus a lot more on how we enable them from the technical capability perspective, because I think that's the core of what Red Hat is about.

“We want our channel partners to be equipped with very strong technical skills to be able to solve problems for our customers and really drive innovation through open source.”