Global Head, Community Architecture & Leadership, Red Hat

Harish Pillay has been with Red Hat since 2003.  He has held many roles and is currently the Global Head, Community Architecture and Leadership. This group works with the greater open source community, to engage, in the APAC region, with government and C-level executives on issues around open standards, open data, open source and how all of these can bring critical value to the respective entities.

These conversations also cover how governments and corporations can adopt the open source ethos and practices - inner sourcing - that have proven to be vastly superior in arriving at IT solutions that's driving disruptive change everywhere.

In 2017, a project he led in Red Hat, called Prospector, was transferred to the Linux Foundation and is now part of the CHAOSS.community project.

Harish holds an MSEE and a BSCS both from Oregon State University. Harish founded the Singapore Linux Users’ Group in 1993 (which predates the founding of Red Hat by a few months). In 2005, he was inducted into the Council of Outstanding Early Career Engineers by the College of Engineering, Oregon State University.

In 2009, he was elevated to Fellow of the Singapore Computer Society.

In 2013, he was named Distinguished Partner by SPRING Singapore, the national standards and quality agency in Singapore for his work and contributions to IT standards work in Singapore and at the International Standards Organization, ISO.

In 2016, he was elected into the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society and in 2017, he was inducted into the Institution of Engineers, Singapore as a Fellow.