Celebrating the 2026 Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Awards honorable mentions

True innovation is never a solo act; it is the result of diverse experts coming together to solve the impossible. While the 2026 Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Award winners represent the pinnacle of open source success, the sheer volume of transformative work across our global network deserves broader recognition.

The following regional honorable mentions represent partners who have acted as force multipliers for our customers. By leveraging the Red Hat portfolio, these organizations have turned complex technical challenges into measurable business value, from securing sovereign AI to automating critical national infrastructure.

AI Visionary honorable mentions

The AI Visionary category recognizes partners who leverage Red Hat’s AI portfolio to create intelligent, scalable and secure environments.

• Dell Technologies (North America): Dell collaborated with a multinational aerospace and defense group to build a sovereign, on-premises GPU platform in just a few months. By leveraging Red Hat OpenShift AI, the team delivered a multi-tenant environment that secures sensitive data while standardizing the AI lifecycle from training to inference.
• Simudyne (EMEA): Simudyne worked with a major global financial market operator to overcome the limitations of traditional risk models. Using agent-based modeling on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, they created a "digital twin" of the exchange that accurately simulates complex market behaviors and liquidity risks.

Automation Accelerator honorable mentions

Our Automation Accelerator category focuses on partners who use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to drive operational efficiency and bridge fragmented environments.

• Pellera Technologies (North America): Pellera helped a large North American financial institution modernize its Windows provisioning process. By replacing legacy custom scripts with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the team reduced turnaround times from several days to just a few minutes.
• Conclusion Xforce, part of Conclusion b.v. (EMEA): Working with a national railway infrastructure manager, Conclusion Xforce embedded observability directly into existing automation flows. Automated onboarding for applications now happens in under 10 minutes, cutting deployment cycles and eliminating manual configuration drift.
• RTM (LATAM): Facing a regulatory-driven surge in demand, RTM used Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to slash implementation times for a leading financial services consulting firm by 94%. This "Zero-Touch" provisioning engine transformed a six-week manual onboarding cycle into a streamlined three-day process.

Container Champion honorable mentions

The Container Champion category celebrates partners leading the way in cloud-native transformation using Red Hat OpenShift.

• Everpure (North America): Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) helped a top-tier wireless carrier consolidate its on-premises storage islands. By standardizing on a shared storage platform for both VMs and containers, the customer targets a $20M reduction in maintenance costs and a 50% lower operational footprint.
• NxtGen (APAC): NxtGen collaborated with a national electoral authority to modernize one of the world’s largest digital infrastructures. This container-first platform achieved 99.9%+ availability during peak operations and improved infrastructure utilization from 35% to 80%.
• Vertis Solutions (LATAM): Vertis developed an intelligent observability layer for a major Latin American telecommunications provider built on Red Hat OpenShift. The solution resulted in an 88% reduction in operational effort and 94% faster failure detection, saving the company over R$1.1M in annual capital expenditure.

Hybrid Cloud Everywhere honorable mentions

The Hybrid Cloud Everywhere category elevates partners who help customers achieve a consistent operational experience across the hybrid cloud.

• Microsoft (North America): Microsoft supported a statutory registry services company through a hybrid cloud transformation that retired legacy datacenters. This reduced capital expenditures by approximately CAD$5.6 million and improved change success rates.
• NxtGen (APAC): For a large diversified manufacturing enterprise, NxtGen built a sovereign cloud powered by Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. This unified fabric for VMs and containers reduced virtualization total cost of ownership by up to 70% and enabled zero-disruption migration from legacy platforms.

Platform Modernization honorable mentions

The Platform Modernization category centers on partners that help replace monolithic systems with agile, cloud-native architectures.

• Peraton (North America): Peraton and Red Hat Consulting jointly optimized a major government tax agency’s Enterprise Container Platform (ECP). The modernization supported multiple successful filing seasons with zero outages, achieving 99.999% monthly availability for premium applications.
• ipt (EMEA): ipt transformed a specialized insurance IT provider’s manual deployment process into a fully automated pipeline. This modernization accelerated deployment times by 5000% and reduced support tickets by 20%.
• TCS (APAC): TCS partnered with one of the world’s largest public-sector banks to revamp its flagship digital "super app". Using Red Hat OpenShift, the team achieved login times of less than two seconds for millions of users while significantly reducing overall time-to-market.

Virtualization Transformation honorable mentions

The Virtualization Transformation category highlights partners leading the migration from traditional hypervisors to modern virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift.

• Arctiq (North America): Arctiq enabled a secure cloud services provider to migrate 75% of its VMs to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization in just eight months. Faced with a 9x legacy licensing increase, the customer achieved a 60-70% cost reduction and can now deploy a full production stack in 50 hours.
• Copy Cat Group (EMEA): In a historic virtualization initiative in East Africa, Copy Cat Group helped a commercial bank consolidate fragmented infrastructure into one resilient stack. The project is projected to reduce operating costs by 25% over three years while improving recovery time objectives.

Congratulations to all our regional honorable mentions! We are honored to work alongside you as we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with open source technology.