2026 Red Hat Innovative Executives

Making the vision a reality: it’s time to take inspiration from innovation

After talking with IT leaders for the better part of 2 decades—through the rise of cloud, the container revolution, and now the AI wave—I have noticed something consistent: technology is rarely what stops people. What stops them is the fear of breaking something that is already working.

That fear is legitimate. 

Every enterprise in this book is running real operations. Banking transactions that cannot fail. Military health systems where downtime has consequences. Manufacturing lines where a bad deployment cascades into physical disruption. These are not greenfield startups with the luxury of burning it down and rebuilding. They are organizations with real stakes—and they modernize anyway.

What I find most interesting about these stories is not the technology choices themselves, though those matter. It is the approach. None of these teams threw everything out and started over. They modernized progressively, at their own pace, without operational disruption. That pattern is something I have come to think of as the real competitive advantage. Not the AI. Not the containers. The discipline to keep moving forward without breaking what the business is dependent on today.

This year’s Red Hat Innovation Award winners each found their own path through that challenge. Their stories are well worth reading in full—but here is what each of them accomplished:

• ARSAT is providing more responsive services and increasing data sovereignty by augmenting network operations with a consistent AI platform.
• The Defense Health Agency (DHA) is saving US$21 million and reclaiming thousands of hours for higher-value strategic priorities and global humanitarian missions through enterprise-wide automation.
• Emirates NBD has consolidated 9,000 virtual machines (VMs) and modern container workloads onto a single, AI-ready platform to ensure 24x7 banking resilience.
• StarHub is building digital trust and delivering real-time quality of experience through cutting-edge polycloud architecture and agentic AI.

This is harder than it sounds. Hybrid environments are genuinely complex. The gap between traditional infrastructure and cloud-native architecture is real and managing both simultaneously while trying to move forward creates friction that can stall even well-funded teams. The organizations in this e-book found a way through that friction—and in most cases, the common thread is a consistent foundation that lets them move across environments without re-platforming from scratch every time something changes.

If you are reading this, you are probably somewhere in the middle of your own version of this journey. Maybe you are managing technical debt that is slowing down your AI ambitions. Maybe you have a hybrid environment that’s increasingly hard to operate at scale. Maybe you’re trying to figure out how to give your team back time that is currently going into keeping the lights on. The question worth sitting with is: which of these stories looks most like where you are trying to go?

The answers are not all the same—nor should they be. But the underlying principle usually is. Build a foundation consistent enough that innovation becomes the default,
not the exception.

That is what these teams did. I hope it is useful to see how.

Implementing a consistent AI platform augments network operations, automates processes, and increases data sovereignty

ARSAT, an Argentine telecommunications infrastructure provider with more than 1,500 clients, needed to respond rapidly to changes in technology and unify its AI development. By deploying Red Hat® OpenShift® AI, the state-owned organization augmented the capabilities of its Network Operations Center (NOC) with AI. This deployment has allowed ARSAT to maximize efficiency, respond faster to client needs, and support data sovereignty while increasing network intelligence and expanding connectivity.

Adapting to technological change across disparate environments

ARSAT’s core mission is to provide and expand high-quality connectivity and digital infrastructure across Argentina. However, the company’s divisions, including its fiber networks, satellites, and datacenters, had grown autonomously over several years and relied on very different technologies. Because these divisions operated independently with different objectives and operational speeds, integration was difficult. To provide clients with services in a more centralized and efficient way, ARSAT needed to bring these departments together to create complementary, integrated solutions that combined connectivity, processing, storage, and backup services.

To address this operational complexity and support more intelligent service delivery, ARSAT worked with Red Hat to implement Red Hat OpenShift AI, selecting the solution for its open source nature. Red Hat OpenShift AI now provides a consistent platform that centralizes AI data and standardizes operations across multiple business verticals. The platform actively augments NOC operators—who manage 1,200 sites and 35,000 km of fiber optics—by assisting with the triage, diagnosis, and resolution of operational issues. This supports faster and more effective responses while preserving human decision making.

Strengthening network intelligence and service innovation 

Accelerated client identification and issue resolution 

The implementation of AI has allowed ARSAT to resolve initial points of contact with clients much more rapidly. By identifying a client and searching for their specific history, ARSAT can better understand the unique architecture of each of its services. This allows the team to perform a more accurate triage of the failure and provide a swifter resolution to key issues.

Improved internal automation and operator experience

ARSAT has successfully incorporated the need to automate processes using AI assistance. For NOC operators, this technology aids in diagnostics, making workloads not only simpler and faster but also more efficient and enjoyable. AI is also used to augment operators’ intelligence, helping them respond in closer to real time while preserving human decision making.

Strengthened technological sovereignty and new skill generation

The project has had a significant positive effect on ARSAT’s technological sovereignty. By developing AI capabilities in house, ARSAT is generating new skills within its teams to manage data connectivity, which is the main component of its operations. This internal capacity building enables ARSAT to offer its clients more effective digitization strategies and local knowledge exploitation.

Expanding AI to new products and infrastructure services 

Having successfully incorporated AI capabilities within its NOC, ARSAT next plans to use Red Hat OpenShift AI to support the development and launch of new products centered around its federal fiber optic network. The organization is now focused on developing future capabilities to further increase network intelligence, expand digital infrastructure services, and support innovation across Argentina’s connectivity ecosystem.

Key outcomes

Red Hat products used

• Red Hat OpenShift AI

How AI is leading ARSAT from fragmented operations to augmented connectivity

by Mariano Greco, President and General Manager, ARSAT

ARSAT’s mission is to provide and expand high-quality infrastructure and connectivity throughout Argentina and into space. We manage a massive scale of operations, including 36,000 km of fiber optics, 2 geostationary satellites covering the Americas, and a 4,500 m2 tier 3 datacenter. 

However, as we sought to respond to increasingly rapid technological changes, we faced a significant hurdle: our business verticals had grown very autonomously. Our satellite, network, and datacenter businesses used fundamentally different technologies, so providing centralized and complex services to our 1,500 clients was difficult.

To overcome these isolated operations, we needed core technology that could centralize our processes and allow us to view each client as a single entity. And because we have a strong internal open source culture, we naturally aligned with Red Hat and implemented Red Hat OpenShift AI. 

We deployed this platform not just as an out-of-the-box product, but as a framework and centralizing engine to transform our Network Operation Centers (NOCs), which manage 1,200 sites nationwide. This implementation allowed us to incorporate AI to organize data and centralize operations, helping us understand each client’s unique, complex architecture, much like medical history.

Since we brought the project into production in 2025, the results of this technological integration have been profound. By using AI as ‘augmented intelligence’, we are not replacing human decision making; rather, we are assisting our NOC operators with complex pattern recognition and preliminary diagnostics. This support makes their workload simpler, faster, and more enjoyable. And for our B2B clients, this directly translates to a much faster resolution at the initial point of contact and highly personalized triage for their specific operational failures.

Ultimately, this transformation is about more than just operational speed; it has a welcome effect on our technological sovereignty. By developing these AI capabilities in house, we are generating crucial new skills within our teams to manage data connectivity, empowering us to offer clients more effective, localized digitization strategies. 

As we look to the future, we are preparing to expand this AI engine to our Federal Fiber Optic Network and associate it with new commercial products directly at the point of contact. More importantly, maintaining our flexibility and working as a community, we are ensuring that our technological growth continues to serve as an engine of humanity.

Replacing fragmented systems with Red Hat automations ensures financial benefits and reclaims thousands of hours for higher-value work

Facing budget reductions and manual inefficiencies, the US Defense Health Agency (DHA) collaborated with Red Hat to automate its infrastructure using Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform. This transformation saved US$21 million and reduced 1-hour tasks to 5 minutes; as a result, engineers now focus on development rather than maintenance.

By standardizing operations, DHA converted manual medical records to digital and improved care for 1.3 million service members. The project also supports global humanitarian missions aboard USNS hospital ships, enhancing operational readiness and patient outcomes. 

Standardizing infrastructure to ensure sustainability

To address manual inefficiencies and fragmented systems, the DHA worked with Red Hat to standardize its infrastructure through enterprise-wide automation. The core solution involved deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to replace disparate custom-built solutions with a standardized, automated datacenter environment.

Led by Process Automation Lead Dave King, the team implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to develop a unified automation framework. This implementation focused on democratizing automation, utilizing Ansible Automation Platform’s accessible YAML syntax to bridge the technical gap between seasoned sysadmins and new DevOps engineers, and Red Hat Customer Portal Labs and Ansible Playbooks to access practical, hands-on training. To manage the agency’s heavy regulations, the team adopted a Policy as Code approach, wrapping legacy infrastructure in modern management layers to automatically enforce Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) compliance and Risk Management Framework (RMF) standards.

To ensure long-term sustainability, the DHA mandated standardization through open collaboration, requiring that all automation assets be modular, reusable, and stored in version-controlled repositories. The agency is now able to deploy compliance updates and changes simultaneously across the entire Military Health System as automated background tas

Improving efficiency and enhancing deployment 

Increased efficiency and promoted proactive development

The implementation reduced the time required for maintenance tasks—which previously took an hour of manual work—down to just 5 minutes. This increased efficiency allowed the DHA to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive work. By automating repetitive tasks, the agency also freed its engineers to focus on higher-value mission priorities rather than routine maintenance. 

Reduced costs over 5 years

The project resulted in a US$21 million financial saving by selecting Red Hat automation solutions over previous traditional VMware products. The total projected saving over the next 5 years is US$62 million. 

Achieved faster, more coordinated, reliable deployments

Automation has enabled the conversion of manual medical records to a digital format, eliminating the need to physically transport files with soldiers, and ensuring that data is accessible globally. This reliability extends to humanitarian missions; the standardized infrastructure now supports the USNS Comfort and Mercy hospital ships, facilitating life-changing surgeries for underserved populations worldwide. Disparate operational groups can also synchronize effectively, removing obstacles to deployment and improving care for 1.3 million service members. 

From fragmentation to AI-ready innovation: Emirates NBD achieves architectural convergence

by Miguel Rio-Tinto, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Emirates NBD

Emirates NBD operates on a global scale, serving more than 20 million customers across multiple geographies. Every single day, millions of transactions flow through our infrastructure—from retail payments and corporate trade finance to real-time credit decisions and digital onboarding journeys. Our mobile platforms, APIs, and core systems operate 24x7, so downtime isn’t just a technical inconvenience: it directly affects our customers, businesses, and the wider economy. 

We faced a challenge that is common to many large banks: operating multiple parallel infrastructures. With traditional virtualization stacks for core systems and separate container platforms for modern applications, we were dealing with fragmentation, duplicated tooling, inconsistent security controls, and a very high cost to serve.

To maintain the enterprise-grade resilience required at our scale, we couldn’t just continue to manage disparate operations: we had to pursue architectural convergence. That is why we partnered with Red Hat to create a single, unified platform capable of running both VMs and containers. 

Our modernization journey is built on open standards, portability, and long-term architectural sovereignty—we want to control our own engineering destiny. By adopting Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, we now run our 9,000 traditional VMs and cloud-native containers side by side on the same Kubernetes control plane. This shift has allowed us to implement unified orchestration, consistent policy enforcement, integrated networking and storage, and standard CI/CD pipelines.

The results of this shift have been transformational: instead of maintaining 2 operating models, we now have just 1. This has dramatically reduced complexity, standardized our observability, and created a consistent developer experience across our 3,000 engineers. We have also been able to modernize progressively, migrating critical banking workloads at our own pace while maintaining essential production stability.

Ultimately, in banking, stability and innovation must coexist. Probably the most powerful benefit of OpenShift Virtualization is that it removes the false choice between traditional and modern infrastructure. We can now run mission-critical VMs and AI-native container workloads on the exact same platform. This means faster innovation, lower complexity, and a foundation that is fully ready for AI at scale. 

And by shifting toward this programmable, self-service infrastructure, we are also giving our engineers the freedom to focus on higher-order problem solving, ensuring that transformation becomes continuous rather than episodic.

Modernizing a fragmented IT infrastructure with automated, cloud-native platforms delivered by Red Hat supports 5G rollout, resulting in major cost savings

Facing a complex legacy environment built through multiple acquisitions, telecommunications service provider One New Zealand needed a scalable foundation to support the next 5 to 10 years of connectivity services. 

By collaborating with Red Hat to establish the One Horizontal Cloud platform, powered by Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the company unified its fragmented architecture. This transformation reduced delivery times by 40% and operating costs by up to 45%, empowering engineers to focus on value-added services and enabling the deployment of a fully cloud-native 5G core.

Building a scalable, future-ready foundation

In a market that demands uninterrupted connectivity, One New Zealand’s highly virtualized but fragmented infrastructure hindered its ability to innovate and scale. Voice, messaging, and 5G core platforms operated on separate architectural frameworks, creating isolated structures and engineering challenges. 

To resolve this, One New Zealand worked with Red Hat Consulting to design a standard reference architecture and build the One Horizontal Cloud. At the core of this unified backbone is Red Hat OpenShift, supported by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, which provide end-to-end automation and reliable service delivery.

One New Zealand has also invested in its people, using Red Hat Learning Subscription and classroom-based training with a gamified approach to help engineers transition to container-based architectures.

Improving provisioning and enhancing deployment

Increased efficiency with zero-touch processes 

By implementing uninterrupted automation and zero-touch provisioning, One New Zealand can automatically provision everything from bare metal servers to operating systems, cluster loading, and security configurations. This end-to-end lifecycle automation has shifted engineers away from manual configuration tasks toward proactive, value-added work for the business. The unified platform has also established a common language, breaking down barriers between networking, application, and cloud infrastructure teams.

Reduced costs and accelerated service delivery

The standardized platform has resulted in a 40% reduction in delivery times and a 30-45% decrease in operational costs for deploying new workloads. Projects that previously took weeks or months to deliver can now be completed in days. In-service software upgrades are now 40 times faster than on the legacy platforms, providing a highly standardized and reliable upgrade process.

Achieved a unified architecture for business-critical networks 

One Horizontal Cloud serves as the cohesive foundation for One New Zealand’s most critical applications, including its voice and messaging platforms, subscriber databases, and a new 5G standalone core. Transitioning these key elements of the telco stack to a single cloud-native mobile core allows the company to move at market speeds and continuously deliver new, highly resilient digital products to 2.3 million mobile connections and more than 110,000 business, enterprise, and government customers.

Expanding automation to new disciplines and AI innovation 

One New Zealand now plans to use its automated infrastructure to become the world’s most AI-enabled telecommunications operator. The organization is expanding the use of the platform to deploy artificial intelligence use cases across its network and IT environments, aiming to augment human capabilities in software development and network operations. One New Zealand is also exploring further collaborations with Red Hat surrounding digital sovereignty and autonomous network operations.

Key outcomes

Red Hat products used

• Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes
• Red Hat Consulting
• Red Hat Learning Subscription

Extending the roadmap for AI and automation

StarHub is now looking to continue its evolution, from TechCo into a trusted service provider, establishing institutional trust as the foundation for its next decade of growth. Future initiatives include integrating post-quantum cryptography and securing agentic AI to set the pace for sustainable innovation.

Timeline

• Initiated: a 5-year roadmap.
• Adopted: polycloud architecture.
• Integrated: secure agentic AI.
• Continued: evolution to becoming a trusted service provider.

Key outcomes

Red Hat products used

• Red Hat OpenShift
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes
• Red Hat Consulting
• Red Hat Technical Account Manager
• Red Hat Training
• Red Hat Learning Subscription

How purpose-led agility is transforming Tata Tele Business Services 

by Anvize Rodrigues, Chief Information Officer, Tata Tele Business Services

Tata Tele Business Services aims to be India’s go-to provider of connectivity and communication solutions for businesses. We handle millions of transactions a day in the telecommunications industry, so every bit of uptime, availability, and scale is critical. However, we found ourselves held back by rigid infrastructure. We were operating as separate units, reacting to market disruptions rather than leading them. 

To stay proactive and fit to face the future, we decided to completely rethink how we operated. We collaborated with Red Hat to build an open, hybrid cloud-led foundation using Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus. 

This wasn’t just a simple technology purchase; Red Hat acted as a true collaborator, questioning our decisions and guiding our underlying processes and architectures to ensure that we could scale confidently.

By migrating away from traditional systems, we successfully decoupled innovation from our outdated infrastructure—and the operational and technical results speak for themselves. Provisioning times that once took 15 days have been reduced to minutes, and our billing cycles have shrunk from 10 days to just 2 or 3. More importantly, automation has drastically reduced system complexity. Instead of dealing with day-to-day operational chaos, our teams are now free to focus on strategic decision-making, innovation, and direct customer engagement.

Of course, continuous evolution in a digital-first environment can easily lead to change fatigue. We conquer this by leading with clarity of intent—always explaining exactly why we are doing what we are doing—and implementing continuous, incremental improvements rather than disruptive, ‘big-bang’ shifts. We now view organizational agility not as a reaction to a problem, but as a deliberately designed capability that is deeply embedded across our technology, culture, and decision-making processes.

Ultimately, we don’t view digital transformation as a mere technology deployment. Success is measured by tangible outcomes and how well we enhance the customer journey. And by aligning our open digital platforms with a people-first mindset, our infrastructure is no longer a bottleneck. Instead, it is the dependable foundation that simplifies our customers’ lives and ensures that purposeful innovation remains deeply rooted in our DNA.

Automation is leading TD from complex maintenance to consistent innovation

Drew Yates, Vice President, Infrastructure, Head of Networks and Datacenter, TD

At TD, we endeavour to provide a consistent, human-centric experience for customers across North America and our global brokerages. However, supporting such a vast infrastructural footprint involves what can feel like a constant stream of lifecycle projects. 

In an environment where IT infrastructure underpins every TD application and system, our engineers were burdened by manual, disconnected provisioning tasks: enabling ports, assigning internet protocol addresses, updating domain name system hosts—we did them all by hand. We also relied on a multitude of different vendor automation tools that lacked integration, forcing our lean team to execute slow, manual changes during tight maintenance windows.

To keep up with constant change, we realized that simply working even harder was no longer a viable option: we had to comprehensively rethink our approach.

We collaborated with Red Hat to decouple the complexity of our many different vendor tools and bring them into a single, cohesive platform. Our focus was to implement Infrastructure as Code using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, providing a vendor-agnostic view of our entire network. By building a foundation of reusable playbooks, we aimed to democratize our automation capabilities, allowing our end-user community and application owners to enact change more quickly—and without having to wait on the infrastructure team.

The results of this technical shift have been transformative. We executed a major infrastructure currency project across over 1,200 US branches in just 3.5 months—a project that typically would have taken over a year. More importantly, we significantly accelerated our speed of delivery, taking device provisioning processes that used to require 4 to 5 hours down to less than 1 hour. By removing manual components from this workstream, we reduced the reliance on our engineering workforce for simple provisioning requests, allowing us to re-baseline our service-level agreements and shift our team’s focus onto proactive platform development and higher-value innovation.

Ultimately, value in our environment is defined by making the infrastructure as invisible and unobtrusive as possible, ensuring that the bank simply works without interruption for our customers. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform gives us consistency and operational stability, providing a predictable platform that enriches developer agility. We are now extending these capabilities by incorporating AI assist and agentic use cases, allowing our network engineers to develop the next generation of playbooks without having to write a single line of code. 

Today, our network infrastructure is a dependable partner in providing uninterrupted, high-quality banking outcomes. And thanks to Red Hat, we have shifted away from a project-only mindset to ensure that innovation is an inclusive, continuous evolution for everyone. 

Unlocking innovation to influence an AI-led future

Whether you are carving out a competitive advantage by adopting AI, scaling into new territories, or using automation to cut costs, the potential to innovate is often tested by the friction between traditional and cutting-edge systems.

Managing hybrid environments and modern container workloads can be a heavy lift, and without a dedicated technology partner, these hurdles can easily stall the most ambitious goals. Red Hat closes the gaps, unlocking the true value of your innovation with a comprehensive portfolio specifically engineered to thrive in a complex world.

We hope that there is a customer story in this collection—such as the transformations at ARSAT, the Defense Health Agency, Emirates NBD, General Motors, or StarHub—that applies to your use case or is of particular interest, and gives an insight into how others used solutions that might be relevant to your future state.

Read the success stories.