Événement en personne

Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 | Melbourne

1 septembre 2026Melbourne, AustraliaThe Ritz-Carlton
Event menu

When everything is open, anything is possible

Where learning meets doing. Red Hat Summit: Connect puts the full Red Hat ecosystem in your hands—expert insights, IT best practices, live product demos, and peer connections that move your team forward.

Add event to calendar:

AppleGoogleOffice 365OutlookOutlook.comYahoo

Agenda

Grow your expertise, build on new skills, and connect with peers through interactive breakout sessions, discussion panels, and more. See available options and start planning your schedule.

8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.

Arrival and registration

9:30 a.m. - 9:50 a.m.

Welcome to Red Hat Summit Connect 2026

Emcee: Mark Carter

Enzo Compagnoni,

Regional Vice President and General Manager, ANZ, Red Hat

9:50 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.

Keynote: Built for impact: AI, security, and the infrastructure decisions that matter

Enterprise IT teams are being asked to do more than ever, with less room to fail. They’re being asked to deploy AI at a pace the business demands, defend against a threat surface that AI itself is expanding, and modernise infrastructure without disrupting what the business depends on. And do it all without adding headcount or risk. This session is for the teams living that reality. We'll cover what's working, what the fastest-moving organisations are doing differently, and what's now possible that wasn't six months ago.

Ashesh Badani,

Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat

Enzo Compagnoni,

Regional Vice President and General Manager ANZ, Red Hat

Derek Waters,

Associate Principal Account Solution Architect, Red Hat

Mandi Buswell,

Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Red Hat

Sigourney Miller,

Director Business Value Practice, Red Hat

10:30 a.m. - 10:50 a.m.

Technology Partner Showcase

10:50 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.

Fireside chat: Voice of Red Hat customers - Tech innovators shaping tomorrow

11:15 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards Presentations

Ashesh Badani,

Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat

Enzo Compagnoni,

Regional Vice President and General Manager ANZ, Red Hat

11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Lunch in solution showcase

12:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Track A: The next platform is choice

12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

OpenShift - your intelligent platform for applications and virtualization

Join our Red Hat OpenShift roadmap session for an overview of its evolution into an intelligent application platform. Discover how OpenShift integrates agentic AI to streamline operations, accelerate troubleshooting, and improve efficiency for container, VM, and AI/ML workloads. We will also cover new support for post-quantum cryptography, native multi-cluster capabilities, extended lifecycles, and digital sovereignty. Learn how these built-in capabilities simplify development and management across hybrid cloud environments, positioning OpenShift as your catalyst for innovation and success in today’s digital ecosystem.

Steven Ellis,

Principal Portfolio Architect, Red Hat

Nick Day,

Associate Principal Solution Architect - OpenShift, Red Hat

1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Powering the future: The next-generation IT Automation platform

Do you have automation in place but wonder how to add AI? You do not need to start over; instead, you can build on what you already have. In this session, we show you how to combine different types of automation—including AI-driven tasks—to solve your work challenges. You will learn how to mix task-driven, event-driven, and AI-driven automation; how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform acts as the main tool to make these methods work together effectively; and why your current safety rules are even more important when using AI. We will walk through a real-world example so you can see how it works. If you want to use AI without disrupting your stable infrastructure, this session is for you.

Stu Bernstein,

Solution Architect - Automation, Red Hat

David Ripani,

Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat

2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Navigating the AI and quantum frontier with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat is re-imagining the open source development model to shape the next version of RHEL, making its roadmap more accessible through transparent, iterative collaboration with the community and customers. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how new Model Context Protocol (MCP) capabilities in Red Hat Satellite transform manual patching workflows into proactive, AI-assisted operations. By automating vulnerability response, prioritisation, and remediation, teams can enhance operational efficiency, security, and reliability across dynamic hybrid cloud environments.

Benjamin Blasco,

Associate Principal Solution Architect - RHEL, Red Hat

Joel Wirāmu Pauling,

Senior Specialist Solution Architect - RHEL, Red Hat

3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Navigating the challenges of sovereign AI: From principles to deployment patterns

As organisations transition AI from experiments to foundational applications, they face complex mandates. True sovereign AI requires more than data localisation; it demands a comprehensive strategy across data, operations, assurance, and technology. Many leaders mistakenly believe this necessitates fully isolated, on-premise deployments, which can hinder scalability and create fragmentation. This session demonstrates how to translate these constraints into scalable architectures using a pattern-based approach. We will explore deployment models, such as the Sovereign Cloud Pattern, to help balance regulatory requirements with AI innovation. Attendees will learn to establish a layered platform architecture for a closed-loop AI lifecycle, ensuring models and data remain within legal boundaries while providing the verifiable audit trails required for trust. Join us to discover how to leverage open hybrid foundations to deploy policy-driven, auditable sovereign AI at scale.

Simon Fennen,

Solution Architect for GSI Partners, Red Hat

Sudesh K Krishnamoorthy,

Solution Architect, IBM

4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

From zero CVE to zero trust

The "Mythos moment" has arrived, and frontier AI is now capable of autonomously discovering, chaining, and exploiting vulnerabilities at machine speed. How do you defend your infrastructure, when the time to exploit vulnerabilities is now measured in hours, not on weeks? In this session we'll explore how Red Hat takes a "Defence in Depth" approach across our products. We'll explore new capabilities like Red Hat Hardened Images, the Zero Trust Workload Identity Operator, and even using AI to better secure AI. Join this session to learn how you can better use the "batteries included" security capabilities with your Red Hat subscriptions.

Shane Boulden,

Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Red Hat

Saanvi Bajaj,

Solution Architect - OpenShift, Red Hat

Track B: The AI ready enterprise is here

12:30 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Turning AI ambition into AI reality: How Red Hat AI Enterprise delivers production-ready AI with confidence, control, and cost efficiency

Join Red Hat as we tackle why most AI initiatives stall, not because the models don't work, but because organisations can't operationalise them. We'll identify the four barriers to real AI value: spiralling economics, safety and trust gaps, inconsistent quality, and the struggle to reach production. Underlying all four is one root cause: embedding non-deterministic models into business processes that demand predictability. We'll unpack the six controls that resolve this tension and turn ambition into reliable, governed AI systems, and introduce GenAIOps: the discipline, practices, and platform capabilities that make those controls real at enterprise scale. Walk away with a clear framework for assessing where your own AI initiatives stand and what's needed to get them to production with confidence.

Bryon Baker,

Associate Principal Solution Architect - AI, Red Hat

Michael Yang,

Senior Account Solution Architect, Red Hat

1:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Become your organisation’s AI provider: Private Model-as-a-Service with Red Hat AI

AI adoption often leads to siloed models, fragmented infrastructure, and governance challenges. This session explores how Red Hat AI enables organisations to become their own Private Model-as-a-Service provider, delivering secure, governed AI models through self-service APIs. Learn how to centralise model serving, optimise GPU utilisation, enforce governance, and provide a scalable AI platform across hybrid cloud environments, empowering developers to consume AI without managing the underlying infrastructure.

Mandi Buswell,

Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Red Hat

Jason Stringer,

OpenShift Sales Specialist, Red Hat

2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Implementing a trusted agentic software factory

Join us as we explore how AI agents are reshaping software development and why the security foundations built for human-speed development can't keep pace with machine-speed risk. Regulators are raising the bar for secure software supply chains and AI governance as autonomous coding agents move from novelty to mainstream practice, creating both opportunity and risk at speed. We'll introduce the Trusted Software Factory: an SLSA Level 3-aligned architecture that embeds security, policy enforcement, and traceability directly into the build pipeline, built on Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and the Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite. We'll then look ahead to the agentic SDLC spectrum, from simple copilots to autonomous, self-directed development agents, and to what it takes to safely operationalise agentic coding at enterprise scale. Walk away with a practical model for securing software as development itself becomes agentic.

James Labocki,

Senior Director Product Management, Developer and Application Services, Red Hat

Ramy El Essawy,

Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Application Platform, Red Hat

3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Technology Partner Session

3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Operationalising the full AI stack with Red Hat AI: From bare metal to agentic AI

Agentic AI is reshaping enterprise application development, but realising its value requires more than deploying models. It requires an operational AI platform spanning infrastructure, inference, model serving, evaluation, governance, and lifecycle management. This session explores how Red Hat AI operationalises the full AI stack, from Model-as-a-Service, AgentOps, AI safety and evaluation for production workloads. Attendees will learn how Red Hat AI provides a secure, scalable, and open foundation for building, deploying, evaluating, and governing AI applications across hybrid cloud environments. The presentation also examines emerging trends including open weight models, token economics, AI governance, and the evolution toward agentic AI. Through architectural guidance and real-world examples, participants will gain practical strategies for operationalising enterprise AI with continuous evaluation, observability, security, and governance while maintaining flexibility, compliance, and control.

Bryon Baker,

Associate Principal Solution Architect - AI, Red Hat

Michael Yang,

Senior Account Solution Architect, Red Hat

4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Unlock AI-driven automation: From AIOps insights to trusted action

Your observability and AI platforms are generating insights faster than teams can act on them. Yet insights alone do not resolve incidents. Every manual handoff between detection and remediation adds delay, inconsistency, and operational risk. In this session, we will explore the missing layer in many AIOps strategies: a trusted, governed execution framework that transforms insights into action while preserving the auditability, change control, and compliance enterprise operations demand. Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we will show how organisations are closing the loop between insights and action through automated remediation, self-healing workflows, and intelligent orchestration, while establishing the governance and execution foundation required for agentic AI.

Tertius Bouwer,

Automation Specialist, Red Hat

Mina George,

Associate Principal Specialist Solutions Architect - Automation, Red Hat

4:30 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.

Closing presentation

Mandi Buswell,

Principal Specialist Solutions Architect, Red Hat

4:45 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.

Red Hat Summit: Connect after party

5:30 p.m.

Event concludes

Speakers

Enzo Compagnoni

Red Hat

Enzo Compagnoni

Regional Vice President and General Manager, ANZ, Red Hat

Enzo Compagnoni is Regional Vice President and General Manager for Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand, responsible for driving business growth and customer digital transformation with open source technology.
He brings over 25 years of enterprise IT experience. Since joining Red Hat in 2016, Enzo has served as Senior Director for Enterprise Sales before stepping into his current leadership role. Prior to Red Hat, he held key leadership positions at technology companies including EMC, PeopleSoft, and PTC.

As a leader, Enzo focuses on leading by example, building strong teams, and delivering customer success. He holds a Bachelor of Business from Western Sydney University. 
Outside of work, Enzo enjoys spending time with his wife Clarissa and two sons, reading, and cycling with the St Kilda Cycling Club.

Ashesh Badani

Red Hat

Ashesh Badani

Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat

Ashesh Badani is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat, where he oversees the company's overall product portfolio across on-premise, public cloud, and edge environments. His responsibilities span strategy, planning, marketing, and operations for core offerings including Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, and Red Hat Ansible Automation.

Previously as SVP of Cloud Platforms, Ashesh helped solidify Red Hat as a hybrid cloud leader, scaling OpenShift into the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. He has also driven strategy and integration for major acquisitions, including StackRox and CoreOS.

Prior to Red Hat, Ashesh led product management and marketing at Sun Microsystems and brings more than 20 years of experience across the technology and finance industries.

Derek Waters

Red Hat

Derek Waters

Associate Principal Solution Architect, Red Hat

Derek Waters is an Account Solution Architect working with financial services customers. Prior to working at Red Hat, Derek spent twenty years working in software engineering across industries as diverse as advertising, defence and health care. He spends his time at Red Hat trying to help others avoid the mistakes he made across those twenty years.

Mandi Buswell

Red Hat

Mandi Buswell

Principal Specialist Solutions Architect , Red Hat

Mandi Buswell, Principal Solutions Architect at Red Hat, is a creative technologist and global speaker. A former Technology Award winner at the Women in ICT NZ Awards, Mandi brings over 30 years of global industry experience driving and overseeing transformative change. Her work at Red Hat focuses on Kubernetes, AI, sovereign cloud strategies, and sustainable solutions. Driven by a deep commitment to positive impact, she combines technical expertise with human-centered problem solving to guide organisations through complex emerging technology transformations.

Sigourney Miller

Red Hat

Sigourney Miller

Director Business Value Practice , Red Hat

Sigourney is a Director within Red Hat's Business Value Practice responsible for the Australia and New Zealand market. With over 20 years of experience working with large organisations Sigourney regulary engages with senior stakeholders across the region to deliver strategic advisory services that articulate the business value associated with investing in Red Hat capability focusing on how such investments directly support and accelerate enterprise-level outcomes.  Sigourney is deeply committed to the transformative potential of technology and its ability to create meaningful impact for both organisations and their customers. She brings a holistic perspective to her engagements, ensuring that technology, culture, and process are aligned to support strategic initiatives and drive measurable, long-term value.

Steven Ellis

Red Hat

Steven Ellis

Principal Portfolio Architect, Red Hat

Steven brings over three decades of experience in the technology industry, having progressed through various roles including development, infrastructure, operations, and DevOps, before moving into architecture. He currently assists Red Hat customers in implementing intricate business solutions, leveraging the power of Red Hat's Enterprise Open Source technologies.

Nick Day

Red Hat

Nick Day

Associate Principal Solution Architect, OpenShift, Red Hat

Nick Day specialises in cloud-native architecture, high-availability platforms, and platform engineering for Telecommunications and Enterprise organizations. With deep expertise across OpenShift, Kubernetes, networking, security and virtualisation he enables teams to build resilient, enterprise-grade platforms that run all workloads.

Stu Bernstein

Red Hat

Stu Bernstein

Solution Architect - Automation, Red Hat

Throughout his career, Stu has held various roles across corporate, enterprise, vendor, and partner organizations. He is passionate about all aspects of automation and platform lifecycle management.

David Ripani

Red Hat

David Ripani

Senior Solution Architect, Red Hat

Dave Ripani is a Solution Architect at Red Hat, where he partners with customers to drive success across the Red Hat Ecosystem. He thrives on exploring new automation ideas and collaborating with clients to turn those ideas into reality. With past experience as both a Product Owner and in Automation, Dave brings a deep appreciation for building scalable, automated, and user-centric environments. In his spare time, you can usually find him breaking things in his home lab, cheering on the blues, or vibe coding something special.

Benjamin Blasco

Red Hat

Benjamin Blasco

Associate Principal Solution Architect, RHEL, Red Hat

Benjamin Blasco is a Solution Architect working with customers and partners to get the best from Linux, automation, and containers. With a history in services and telecommunications, he understands the importance of testing, consistency, and repeatability in managing enterprise environments at scale. He enjoys running, heavy metal, and time with family in Melbourne, Australia.

Joel Wirāmu Pauling

Red Hat

Joel Wirāmu Pauling

Senior Specialist Solution Architect, RHEL, Red Hat

With over 20 years of experience in Free/Libre/Open Source Software (F/LOSS) and *NIX systems, Joel is a strategic advocate for Open Source adoption, particularly in telecommunications. He combines deep technical expertise with business strategy to bridge technology and organisational culture, engineering scalable open infrastructure like large-scale open routing and private cloud architectures.

A seasoned Linux/RHEL administrator, Joel actively engages with upstream community projects and governance. His background in social and data sciences enables a holistic approach to complex business challenges, driving sustainable open technology solutions.

Connect with him to discuss strategic Open Source initiatives or Linux expertise.

Socials:
https://cloudisland.nz/@jwp
https://linkedin.com/in/aenertia

Simon Fennen

Red Hat

Simon Fennen

Solution Architect for GSI Partners, Red Hat

Simon leads a practice of solution architects across APAC supporting our GSI partners to transform and modernise their clients using technology from Red Hat. With over 20 years of experience consulting with enterprises and government agencies, Simon specialises in emerging technologies, AI, cloud architecture, cybersecurity, and automation. 

Shane Boulden

Red Hat

Shane Boulden

Principal Specialist Solution Architect, Red Hat

Shane Boulden is a Solution Architect at Red Hat, supporting Fortune 500 companies and government organisations across Australia and the region to adopt open source technologies. He is a frequent speaker at events including Red Hat Ansible Automates and MilCIS, and recently spoke about the 'StackRox' open source project at Everything Open 2025, held in Adelaide. He has contributed to security-focused open source projects like 'Compliance as Code', StackRox, and Keycloak, and is a contributing author to the second edition of  "The Kubernetes Bible". His recent focus has been looking at applications of generative AI and security, and helping organisations modernise applications with OpenShift Virtualization.

Saanvi Bajaj

Red Hat

Saanvi Bajaj

Solution Architect - OpenShift, Red Hat

Saanvi Bajaj is a Red Hat Solutions Architect specialising in OpenShift, with previous experiences in product delivery, lifecycle and security in other roles in enterprise organisations. She harbours great enthusiasm for the emerging technologies, and even greater enthusiasm to collaborate with organisations to achieve success through enterprise grade container management and application platform solutions.

Bryon Baker

Red Hat

Bryon Baker

Associate Principal Solution Architect, AI, Red Hat

Bryon Baker is a Specialist Solution Architect for Red Hat Asia Pacific. Having previously held managerial, engineering and architecture positions at National Australia Bank, Rational Software (USA), Ivar Jacobson International, and Siemens Research (UK), Bryon brings over 30 years of diverse experience in the IT industry.

Bryon’s experience spans embedded systems, electronics engineering, systems engineering, enterprise architecture, AI/ML and product management. Bryon is most passionate about machine learning and distributed system architectures.

Bryon holds a Bachelor of Science from Deakin University with majors in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Jason Stringer

Red Hat

Jason Stringer

OpenShift Sales Specialist - Enterprise, Red Hat

Jason Stringer is an OpenShift Sales Specialist at Red Hat, where he helps customers build the platforms that power AI, hybrid cloud and modern applications. With more than 20 years of enterprise IT experience accross Red Hat, Cisco, IBM and HP, Jason specialises in helping organisations modernise their infrastructure and confidently adopt new technologies.

James Labocki

Red Hat

James Labocki

Senior Director Product Management, Developer and Application Services, Red Hat

James is a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience in engineering, technical marketing, and product management. As Senior Director of Product Management, he is responsible for Red Hat’s developer and application related technologies including Red Hat Developer Hub, Podman Desktop, Secure Software Supply Chain, and several other products.

He has worked in numerous roles including sales engineering, technical marketing, and product management while at Red Hat over more than 17 years. Prior to Red Hat, James held leadership roles in engineering and architecture at several startup companies and large technology organizations.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business.

Outside of work James enjoys running, reading, and spending time with his wife and six children.

Tertius Bouwer

Red Hat

Tertius Bouwer

Automation Specialist, Red Hat

Tertius Bouwer is an Automation Specialist for Red Hat, with expertise in automation leveraging Ansible technology, supporting the automation journeys of organisations across Australia and New Zealand.

Tertius has a keen focus on driving organizational growth and efficiency through automation. He harnesses the power of Ansible to streamline processes and optimise workflows for clients across diverse industries in Australia.
Having honed his skills over the past 20 years, Tertius possesses a deep understanding of how automation can revolutionise business operations, enabling companies to achieve their objectives with greater speed and precision. Tertius combined technical acumen with a customer-centric approach, he excels in crafting tailored solutions that meet the unique needs of each client.

Mina George

Red Hat

Mina George

Associate Principal Specialist Solutions Architect, Automation, Red Hat

Mina George is an Automation Specialist Solutions Architect at Red Hat, with over 20 years of experience in managing and automating infrastructure services in multi-cloud environments across the telecom, ICT, finance industries, and government sector.

Mina has extensive hands-on experience in designing, implementing, and operating solutions using multiple products in the Red Hat portfolio, as well as non-Red Hat industry-leading technologies. Driven by a zero-touch automation mindset, Mina excels at evaluating organisational challenges, identifying opportunities for process improvement, and designing solutions that drive business growth and optimise systems and workflows.

Venue information

Date: September 1, 2026

Time: 8:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. AEST

Location: The Ritz-Carlton,
650 Lonsdale St,
Melbourne VIC 3000

Summit Connect Logo

Join us at Red Hat Summit: Connect Melbourne 2026

If you have general questions about the event, contact anzevents@redhat.com.

A collage of diverse people collaborating and networking at a lively Red Hat conference