Exclusive Interview: Abhishek Datt, CTO, Taashee Linux Services

In a conversation with DQ Channels, Abhishek Datt, CTO, Taashee Linux Services Ltd. talks about the challenges faced during the COVID and how Rad Hat has supported them with different engagements.  

What are the different challenges you faced during the COVID time as a partner in terms of interaction with Vendors, customers and payment issues?

When COVID has started, there were many problems in terms of payment issues, interaction with customers, and interaction with vendors. The challenge we are facing in this new covid situation is, some of the big projects that we were hoping to come by last quarter got postponed and there is no definitive answer that we are receiving from the customer. The second thing that we are seeing is the payment cycles have increased by 2x days.

What are the recent developments that have been done at the Taashee perspective?

We are seeing the bandwidth of taking decisions in terms of the technical side has become more agile. We have the highest productivity from the billing perspective of our technical team. All the biggest SI’s or even the enterprise now increasingly understand the importance of containers and when it comes to containers, we have seen cases where people started with different vendors and later on decided ease of doing business with Red Hat OpenShift. This has opened up a huge pool of opportunities for us. We are recruiting and increasing our Red Hat OpenShift team on a regular basis. We are hiring people from the Red Hat OpenShift side in the coming days.

What are the different supports that partners are getting from vendors?

Our journey started with Red Hat and it had gone leaps and bounds from there itself. But one of the primary reason being that it's an extremely partner-focused company. We have been working with all the top names in the industry, but we have not seen that kind of commitment that kind of engagement model that Red Hat has with partners. The training that we receive is exactly the same if not more rigorous compared to all the internal solution architects or internal teams of Red Hat receive. We have the access to the same lab, we have the access to the same material, and we have the same accreditation and certifications to actually take us through. Our team has to have the same level of competency built in our site and Red Hat drives it. They have a very wonderful digital learning platform.

Taashee offers a lot of different solution, like application transformation, cloud computing, information management, IT DevOps, life science. What are the technologies that will be the future?

The near future would definitely be containers and then in the years to come is that containers will become mainstream and there will be a lot of interplay of AI and security tools on the container platforms. For example, you want to do a complete security scan of your entire infrastructure running on the container platform. That can be a very strong area because most of the security tools at this point in time are very centric to either on the bare metal or virtualization, or many of them on the cloud side as well, but primarily the virtual instances are the only area that they generally target, but as the containers are growing, you need different kinds and different ecosystem of products. You will see a lot of these major product vendors would be starting to offering mainstream products on the container platform site.

Also Read: Exclusive Interview: Neeraj Bhatia, Director, Red Hat

Where do you see the maximum traction is coming from any specific vertical?

From Taashee perspective, the BFSI sector was always active and was always at the forefront of embracing new technologies, particularly the ones which were value-driven. OpenShift is a very value-driven offering. BFSI has always been very strong with us. We have also seen the traction coming in the telecom sector as well. It is driving very strong value across different industries and whosoever is becoming savvier. We are working primarily with BSFI, but we also have at least two or three major telecoms, where we have done OpenShift and they are embracing it in a big way.

What are different schemes and incentive programs Partners are getting from Red Hat?

Red Hat typically is a very partner-centric organization. They keep on going in with a lot of incentive programs, particularly in the new age technology band. We have OpenShift Ansible with the higher margins. Our company gets much better margins and paybacks, if we are bringing in new accreditation certifications onto the table from our team. I think every end to the organization as such, the program is very liberal and very encouraging as well.

What are your future goals for the next 12 to 18 months?

From a technical standpoint, we are actually increasing the size of the digital transformation team. We have hired some very strong team to actually help customers to make their applications. Red Hat has a very rich product suite at the Dev site. That means three scales as an API gateway. We have process automation manager at a very Dev centric product portfolio. We would like to increase our presence and make a customer is also increasingly using it because all of them make their applications more cloud-native, and also help them to reduce the code and increase the manageability.