Taming hybrid cloud complexity: A path to true agility

IT leaders face many challenges today, but few are as daunting as this: How do you keep up with the pace of change when your existing IT infrastructure is already so complex? For many enterprises, the primary source of that complexity is the struggle to manage containerized applications at scale across diverse environments—from on-premises data centers to multiple public clouds. This fragmentation can lead to inconsistent operations and vendor lock-in, which stifles agility and innovation. As we navigate the era of AI, IT leaders need a unified, predictable way to manage it all so that your teams can focus on higher-value work.

I've had the unique opportunity to see this problem from both sides. In my previous roles leading customer-facing teams, I saw firsthand how our customers leveraged Red Hat OpenShift to tackle their most complex challenges, such as streamlining their hybrid cloud experiences and reducing operational complexity. It was profoundly rewarding to see them use our platform to break free from the status quo.

Now, as the CIO of Red Hat, my perspective has shifted to that of an internal customer. I see the immense value of OpenShift even more clearly because we also use it to run Red Hat’s business. We are our own customer zero, not because our leadership team mandates it, but because the product works for us. Our experience has been a testament to the platform's power to create consistency across our hybrid cloud environment, which has been critical for managing our global operations. Our teams have seen significant improvements, including shorter cycle times from code to production and better standardization of application architectures. By using OpenShift, our applications have improved cloud agility, allowing them to move across our hybrid cloud environment without concern for the underlying infrastructure. This, for me, is the core of what we mean by agile transformation.

This experience is why I'm so excited that Red Hat has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms for the second year in a row. According to Gartner, Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow. Having worked with our customers and been one myself, I believe that our strategic execution and vision come from understanding the challenges IT teams are actually facing today. 

In leading Red Hat’s IT organization, I've learned that not everything can be consistent in a hybrid cloud environment. But if you empower your application owners and developers with the right platform, tools, and patterns, you can encourage well-architected solutions without blocking innovation. The solution we’ve built internally using OpenShift is designed to help application owners make the best possible choices for their applications. It integrates with other IT technologies and services to enable a self-service experience for Red Hat developers, removing bottlenecks and lowering the support burden. The self-service features are built to meet today’s security, reliability, cost, and performance requirements for enterprise applications, so teams can manage applications responsibly. 

Using OpenShift also prepares us for the future by consolidating all workloads—including containers, virtualization, and AI—onto a single platform. We are migrating virtualized workloads from Red Hat Virtualization and OpenStack to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, and will use Red Hat OpenShift AI for our AI workloads. This will extend the benefits realized with containers to all workloads, improving efficiency and empowering our teams, especially as we integrate AI across the organization. 

Our recent acknowledgment from Gartner reinforces my belief that the open source way—our commitment to openness, authenticity, helpfulness, and bravery—is the best way to innovate and deliver real value to our customers. We are incredibly proud of this recognition and will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with open source technology. I’m looking forward to seeing what new innovations our customers unlock, with OpenShift as the foundation. 

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift for Cloud-Native Application Platforms

A full copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant on Cloud-Native Application Platforms can be downloaded here: Red Hat a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms.

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