On one of his regular working days, Damien Wong would find himself waking up to a different city and interacting with different cultures. It is all part of his routine and an aspect of his work that he enjoys.

Wong is the general manager for Asean Red Hat Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and is in Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500. On a recent trip to Manila, he updated business reporters on the latest developments of his company. It has been a great ride for Red Hat, he said, and all indications show it could only get better. In particular, 2012 is their banner year as it shows their company crossing the $1-billion revenue mark.

Red Hat is an American software company with headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. It provides enterprise-strength, mission critical software and services in today’s most important IT areas, specifically on the operating systems, storage, middleware, virtualization and cloud computing. Its open source model supplies enterprises with computing solutions across physical, virtual and cloud environments that reduce costs, improve performance, reliability and security.

Red Hat was founded in 1993, a result of a merger of two companies. Back then, Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corp., a catalog business that sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux. The following year, Young bought Ewing’s business and the two merged to become Red Hat Software.

Red Hat achieved one of its many milestones when it went public in August 1999. It achieved the eighth biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street. In 2002, the company came out with its very first release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In 2006, Red Hat ventured into the middleware business through the acquisition of a company called Jboss, and later went into the virtualization capability through the acquisition of another company Qumranet—in 2008.

Wong said that the company’s rapid growth continued with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in 2009. Shortly after, the software company joined the elite S&P 500 stock index, a diversified index of 500 leading companies of the US economy. In 2011, the company released its own cloud forms and openshift.

“The open source is our development model and not our business model,” Wong said, adding that it enabled the company to grow faster because it also serves as an incubator of ideas from the open source community. He also proudly said that the first clouds ever built were built on Red Hat technology.

In the Philippines, Wong said that Red Hat’s focus is on cloud computing and platform modernization. Among the company’s numerous customers in the country are telecoms companies and the government.

The Philippine Stock exchange is one of Red Hat’s satisfied customers, according to Wong.

The major challenge of the exchange, he said, was to build a solution to replace legacy trading system with minimal disruption, scalability and flexibility. Red Hat was able to solve the problem through its Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As a result, PSE’s transaction volume doubled, and the exchange did not encounter any degradation with the system performance.

Wong also said that in the future, only two operating systems will remain—Windows and Linux. This makes Red Hat all the more excited and secure about its prospects for growth as a company and is very positive that its dominance will continue.

All these developments make Wong and his staff busier than ever. Wong regularly monitors and interacts with the company’s many partners and clients across the region. After the Philippine tour, Wong and his staff will fly back to Singapore where their office is located. In a few days they will once again fly to another destination in the Asia Pacific region.

Wong doesn’t mind being constantly on the road. He previously worked for other IT companies and he said that each one was an enriching experience for him. Because for him, “what’s important is you love what you’re doing and the work will be worthwhile.”