Meet the latest Red Hat OpenShift Superheroes

Earlier this month at Red Hat OpenShift Commons in Amsterdam, co-located with KubeCon + CloudNativeConEU, we celebrated a few Red Hat OpenShift Superheroes. While each member of the Red Hat OpenShift community is a hero for helping contribute to a project’s success and growth, some members really stand out. They are the advocates and champions who make the community strong and successful.

From left: Xuan-Son Nguyen - BNP Paribas, Jan-Willem - ING Bank.

Red Hat OpenShift Superheroes are:

• Builders: Contributing to the evolution of Red Hat OpenShift
• Advocates: Amplifying their Red Hat OpenShift experience and learnings through events, blogs, meetups, and more
• Ambassadors: Sharing knowledge across diverse teams, industries, organizations
• Bug Hunters: Identifying and solving Red Hat OpenShift bugs so others don't have to

Meet the superheroes

Here's a look at those recognized for helping to advance the Red Hat OpenShift community through their contributions, participation, and innovation. These nominations have been edited slightly for readability and context.

Jan-Willem Bijma (ING)

The Bug Hunter

“Jan-Willem has the dubious honor of spending most of his time analyzing the behavior of Red Hat OpenShift and finding and resolving bugs. But what most people don't understand is the amount of effort involved in clarifying a bug, making it reproducible in a different context, providing all relevant information to Red Hat to complete the case, and verifying the bug is indeed solved (and the solution did not introduce other bugs). Thanks to heroes like Jan-Willem, Red Hat OpenShift stability has improved significantly for all others in the community to benefit from, and hence we should reward the Jan-Willems in this world for their efforts!”

Xuan-Son Nguyen (BNP Paribas)

The Builder

“Xuan-Son Nguyen has played a key role in building and scaling one of the most advanced Red Hat OpenShift-based AI platforms in the financial services industry. At BNP Paribas, he leads the design and operation of a sovereign, production-grade AI and LLM as a Service platform, running on Red Hat OpenShift and OpenShift AI and supporting thousands of internal users across multiple regulated entities.”

Roger Shutte (MTN Nigeria)

The Ambassador

“As GM of Infrastructure and Cloud at MTN Nigeria, Roger Schutte has pioneered a high-velocity migration to a standardised Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) foundation, transitioning 70% of Linux workloads in 120 days with zero downtime across an 80-million-subscriber network. By architecting a unified Red Hat OpenShift environment for both virtual machines (VMs) and containerised microservices, he has bridged legacy and cloud-native silos, creating a blueprint for sovereign cloud, that ensures data residency and regulatory compliance. Roger has institutionalised an automation-first culture via Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, reducing Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and operational overhead while actively evangelising these open source frameworks to build local, technical ecosystems across the industry. His leadership demonstrates how hybrid cloud consistency and open platforms can solve complex foreign exchange and infrastructure constraints, making him a definitive ambassador for scalable, community-driven innovation in Africa.”

Christoph Linse (ONLU)

The Advocate

“Christoph Linse is a Senior IT Consultant and Cloud-Native Engineer with deep expertise in Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift-based platform development, GitOps workflows, infrastructure automation, and observability. He works at ONLU AG, where he combines frontend, backend, and DevSecOps experience to build scalable cloud solutions. In his article “Scaling OpenShift Monitoring with TypeScript, CDK8s, and ArgoCD,” he describes a concrete technical solution for bringing consistency, automation, and scalability to monitoring across multiple OpenShift clusters.”

Tejas Jayanth Shah (Wipro Technologies)

The Ambassador

“Tejas enables account teams on Red Hat OpenShift and conducts in-person training at Wipro offices in India. He is also instrumental in guiding associates in enrolling and completing Ascend learning paths and certification courses that not only helps in building expertise in Red Hat technologies but also helps them prepare for Red Hat certification exams. As an internal subject matter expert (SME) on Red Hat OpenShift, Tejas regularly conducts instructor-led sessions within Wipro on DO188 ( Podman ), Kubernetes, OpenShift Admin L1 (DO180), OpenShift Admin L2 ( DO280), OpenShift Developer ( DO288), and OpenShift Virtualization (DO316) within Wipro. So far, 10+ BFSI customer account teams within Wipro have been enabled on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization by Tejas. He holds the following Red Hat Certifications: Red Hat Certified Engineer, Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers Exam (EX188), Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration, and Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Virtualization (first and only person in Wipro). As an advocate and a subject matter expert of Red Hat OpenShift within Wipro, Tejas is a key contributor and a true Red Hat Ambassador.”

Nominate today

Do you know someone who helps the Red Hat OpenShift community thrive? Nominations are currently open for next spring's OpenShift Superhero Awards, which will be recognized at our Red Hat Summit OpenShift Commons Community Event in Atlanta, GA on May 11.  

Did you miss OpenShift Commons in Amsterdam? If so, watch the gathering on-demand on Youtube.