Production-ready: Red Hat’s blueprint for 2026

Every year, when I look at the landscape of the technology industry, I am reminded of why Red Hat exists. We have always thrived at the intersection of complex technology challenges and open source-based, community-driven innovation. Over the last few years, that has meant exploring the horizons of new methods of virtualization and artificial intelligence, which were just beginning to take shape.

Today, as we move into 2026, I am here to tell you that Red Hat is no longer just a software provider; we have the opportunity to partner with our customers to build the platforms that will redefine their entire organizations.

IT leaders today are facing a storm of complexity. They are under immense pressure to innovate while simultaneously keeping the lights on. They are navigating a virtualization landscape where many feel the rug has been pulled out from under them. And perhaps most pressingly, they are hearing mixed messages about AI—alternating between fears of a bubble and the promise of a business game-changer.

Customers have never before needed a strategic partner that can take them on this journey.  Our model, based on open source, assures them that what we build for them is owned by the customers. Our business, by design, is merely to support their success. From the foundation of virtualization to the stability of the operating system, the innovation in containers, and the blistering pace of AI inference, we can guide them on this journey. Whether this is to enable sovereign requirements or just to build a model they can truly trust - we stand apart here.  Stepping up at this critical moment will be the core of Red Hat’s focus for 2026.

When we provide these technologies, we aren't just selling bits and bytes; we are selling the ability for our customers to dream bigger and be the hero of their story, with the trust and confidence to go beyond the ordinary. With software progressing at an impossibly fast pace, RHEL provides the bridge between the applications you have and the demands of AI on a trusted base. Even as the pace of RHEL increases, we offload the burden of upgrades and compatibility from our customers. OpenShift then adds to this with a unified platform that now spans containers, virtualization and AI. It’s one platform that lets you bring together your applications of today and tomorrow. And Ansible helps get you there. It provides the core operational automation that allows you manage this environment and keep everything coordinated effectively. When you combine this with the potential that is available to customers with smaller AI models that they can refine to their needs in conjunction with other powerful models available to them, the potential is unlimited.

And why do I have such conviction in the potential here? Because we do all of this ourselves.  We have spent the last year heads-down on our AI journey and have made incredible progress on our own technology stack. RHEL 10, OpenShift, OpenShift AI, vLLM, Granite 4, Guardian - we use all of it, at scale, with many of you contributing to it. It’s been a technology stack that has embodied the spirit of open source for us. We have had contributions of content and code from every major organization in our company - not just engineering. The capabilities here and your contributions will redefine Red Hat. That is already underway - that is why I know it’s possible for our customers.

We’ve been saying and will continue to say that the future of AI is open source. We are giving customers the ability to use AI in the way that makes the most sense for them, whether that’s smaller, trainable, deploy-anywhere models with specific roles or incorporating frontier model services into production applications. Regardless,  our goal is open platforms to unlock the pure value of AI, not "black boxes" that trap their data and workloads.

We have spent decades proving that open is better. We proved it with RHEL, and we proved it with the hybrid cloud. Now, we are proving it again with AI, taking this technology and forging it into the trusted, production-ready platforms that will define our next chapter.