Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2020: Hybrid cloud leads strategy, AI/ML leaps to the forefront

For the sixth year running, we have reached out to our customers to hear where they are in their technology journey, and where they wish to go in the next year. For the 2020-focused survey, we received more than 870 qualified responses¹ from Red Hat customers from around the world. They've weighed in about their challenges, strategies, and technologies they are planning to pursue in the next year and we're eager to share the results with you in our report. 

Some of the top takeaways this year are:

1. Active digital transformation projects continue to rise.

2. Companies are recognizing the importance of culture.

3. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) are of high interest.

Hybrid leads cloud strategy

According to the survey, hybrid cloud is the most common term used to describe our customers' cloud strategy. 31% say "hybrid" describes their strategy best, 21% are leading with a private cloud approach, and only 4% declared a public cloud first strategy. In the report we break this down even further by region, and find that there's some big differences in North America and EMEA when it comes to private and hybrid cloud plans. 

Seeing the value of the Open Organization

Red Hat has been touting the value of the open organization for some time now, and it seems that a significant number of our customers agree. 42% of the respondents say that they're in some stage of embracing an open organization culture, while 12% are undecided. Only 29% say they have no plans to evolve their culture. 

AI/ML moving to the forefront

Last year, blockchain topped the list of emerging tech workloads our customers voiced an interest in. This year? It's relegated to fourth place with just 12% saying it would be a likely workload. 19% of the respondents said the Internet of Things (IoT), and 21% said that serverless or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) were in their plans. 

The top of the heap, though, is AI/ML, which wasn't even in the top three last year. We're keeping an eye on edge computing this year as well, and won't be surprised if that creeps up a bit higher in the list in the 2021 survey.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves! There's much more in the results from this year's Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook. Download the report and find out what we learned from our customers.