Red Hat Thailand, the local operating unit of the global open source firm, expects artificial intelligence (AI) to be its new growth engine, enabling organisations to deploy generative AI on a cost-effective basis.
Thailand is considered a strategic country for Red Hat as enterprises here adopt "mission critical" systems with an open source approach.
"We continue to grow our local business by double-digits annually, with increased adoption of our tech solutions, particularly in new markets such as healthcare, in addition to our core sectors of financial services, telecom, aviation, retail, manufacturing, automotive and the public sector," said Supannee Amnajmongkol, country manager of Red Hat Thailand.
"We've operated a local office for nine years, with local staff growing from two to 30, reflecting the rise in customers," said Ms Supannee.
The company's position in an open-hybrid cloud system enables organisations to reduce the complexity of information technology (IT) operations by running systems in multi-cloud environments, supporting any applications and creating innovation with cost optimisation, she said.
Red Hat has increased AI capability for its existing products to help customers better utilise its products.
The company has also expanded its new product portfolio to enable organisations to access AI technology more easily at lower cost and with trusted sources of data.
From left: Mr Niwat, Karnrawee Chirasonthikan, senior vice-president of GSB's IT planning department, and Ms Supannee.
The company provides Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, a foundation model platform that enables users to develop, test and deploy generative AI models, AI platforms, AI-enabled portfolios, as well as support AI workload, she said.
Red Hat encourages customers to use a small language model rather than the large language model due to lower central processing unit and graphics processing unit (GPU) requirements, which result in significant cost savings when using AI.
The cost of a high-end GPU can be as much as US$30,000.
Ogranisations can use their own data to train AI in secure environments and laptops to train AI without an expensive GPU, said Ms Supannee.
"We're in discussions with customers in the banking and telecom sectors for proof of concept of open-source AI projects," she said.
Early adoption of digital transformation in Thailand makes the country one of Red Hat's strategic markets, said Ms Supannee.
Recently two of its Thai clients were among 31 winners from 11 countries at the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards.
The clients are Government Savings Bank (GSB) and National ITMX Co Ltd, which both bagged awards in the same "Digital transformation and cloud-native development" category.
The awards were made to acknowledge their achievements in leveraging Red Hat solutions creatively to transform and innovate.
GSB has 26 million accounts, of which 16 million are MyMo mobile app users.
National ITMX operates PromptPay, a digital payment system for consumers.
Niwat Kanwaset, National ITMX's senior assistant managing director for the platform operation business unit, said PromptPay had 80.4 million Thai registered users as of February 2025.
PromptPay recorded more than 23 billion transactions in real-time last year via both credit transfer and QR code scans.
Red Hat has allowed the company to enhance scalability, stability, cost per transaction efficiency, and integration speed in local and cross-border QR payments to help it provide a better user experience for digital customers, said Mr Niwat.
