Resistance is Futile in Chengdu
January 29th, 2008 | by This is China! |
Last week ChinaTechNews (January 23, 2008) announced that “RedHat, one of the leading open source solution providers, has opened a R&D center in China, and Jim Whitehurst, RedHat’s newly appointed president and CEO, has arrived in China to unveil the center and release the company’s new program, the Open SystemC Initiative.”
I’m presuming RedHat has chosen to stay in Chengdu, based on an earlier story in ChinaTechNews (24 August 2007): “RedHat, one of the world’s largest open source and Linux software providers, has landed in Chengdu through Sofmit, the largest outsourcing software company in Sichuan Province.” RedHat and Sofmit had established a RedHat Southwest SOA Solution Center and China SOA Service Center in Chengdu.
The Central Government in Beijing identified Chengdu as one of the ten second-tier cities that will be standard-bearers for China’s nascent IT industry. IT – especially IT Outsourcing and BPO – are perfect industries for Chengdu’s isolated geography, there in mountainous Sichuan province, in south central China. Interestingly, precisely because there are so many bright young things working in the IT industry in Chengdu, and Chengdu is so cheap for Chinese to live (the city has a reputation in China for being one of the most laidback settings in the country), residents there have the highest level of disposable income per capita of any city in China.
One of Redhat’s grand plans is to partner up with the excellent technical universities in the area to create armies of Linux programmers, while they’re still vunerable to options outside the Microsoft universe.
Watch out Microsoft… resistance is futile!
Bill Dodson
SUZHOU, China
