Software giant Red Hat launched its Brno subsidiary in 2006. At that time, it was manned by just a couple of people and its office wasn’t larger than a flat. Today this company employs more than 1,000 people in Czechia, also thanks to cooperation with the Faculty of informatics at the Masaryk University.
Red Hat products are almost mythical. Almost everyone has heard about them, but only a few people realize they came in contact with them. The company develops software used in ATMs, chips, cars. Also, everyone who has watched DreamWorks animated movies came across them – their enormous quantity of data has been processed by tools provided by Red Hat. This company has the largest developer centre in Czechia. And by Czechia we mainly mean Brno because that’s where all the engineers designing new solutions for 23 company products reside.
“Years ago we were trying to find a place where we could grow. A lot of tech companies expanded to India at that time, but our work was based on the open source principle and it seemed to us that engineers in Eastern Europe are much more skilled in this respect,” said Paul Cormier, the company’s manager responsible for products and technologies who was one of the founders of the new subsidiary.
“We chose Czechia mainly because of the enthusiasm of local people who were starting with us at that time. To be perfectly frank, originally we aimed for a low-budget model, but everything grew so fast and well that money then wasn’t an issue at all,” said Cormier, smiling.
Even though Czechs themselves often might not have an inkling about it, for Red Hat Brno is a model for cooperation with colleges and other institutions which is then applied elsewhere. In case of Red Hat for instance now in Boston. “We were a small start-up, we had seven people here and we stayed mainly because there was a university, a wonderful source of a well-qualified workforce,” said Cormier.
..."It’s not very likely that this Brno company will move further East. “I keep hearing that we should have a developer base in Vietnam or in Poland, but I just don’t see why. Why should we move when we grew up in Brno so well,” said Cormier. According to him and his colleagues, we could see just more specialization of local developers – that they will not work on all products but will focus on some of them and go deeper.
>> Read full article by brnoregion.com
Red Hat has the largest developer centre in Czechia. And by Czechia we mainly mean Brno because that’s where all the engineers designing new solutions for 23 company products reside. https://t.co/1p0FFqYn3M@RedHat @redhatopen @RedHatPartners
— brnoregion (@brnoregion) June 13, 2018
Source, image credit: brnoregion.com
Members of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic
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