Learn from the experts
Red Hat® Summit and AnsibleFest 2025 is your chance to shape the future of open technology. Hear from speakers across Red Hat and the open source community at this year's event.
Engage with specialists across disciplines
Our event will feature presenters who are customers, partners, Red Hat experts, and open source leaders.
The full speaker lineup will be announced closer to Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest.
Keynote speakers
Discover new perspectives on the current and future technology landscape with insights from open source leaders.
Matt Hicks
President and CEO, Red Hat
Matt Hicks was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in July 2022. In his previous role, he was Executive Vice President of Products and Technologies where he was responsible for all product engineering, including products such as Red Hat® OpenShift®, Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, the JBoss® middleware portfolio, OpenStack® and Ansible®.
He has been with Red Hat for 16 years, watching it grow from a single-product company to the multi-billion-dollar enterprise it is today. He was also one of the founding members of the OpenShift team and has been at the forefront of cloud computing ever since.
With more than 25 years of Linux experience and a background in computer engineering, Hicks has always had a passion for combining infrastructure and application technologies. His engineering background includes several years at IBM, as well as startup experience, where he served in various roles spanning engineering, IT, and consulting. This breadth of experience has allowed Hicks to use technology to solve customer and business problems across all areas of IT. With technology innovation converging on open source, Linux, and containers, his experience has placed him at the center of what he believes to be the most exciting time in industry history.
Chris Wright
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Engineering, Red Hat
Chris Wright is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat. He leads a team that guides Red Hat’s technology vision, co-creates technologies, and collaboratively implements change to ensure the success of Red Hat’s ecosystem of associates, customers, communities, and partners. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.
Wright’s Global Engineering organization includes: AI Engineering, Ecosystem Engineering, Experience Engineering, Field CTO organization, Office of the CTO, Product Engineering, and Product Security. During his 25+ years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He also has experience in the Linux® industry on security, virtualization, and networking. Wright has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, with most of this time spent working deep in the Linux kernel.
Stefanie Chiras
Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat
Stefanie Chiras is Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, leading Red Hat’s global partner ecosystem engagement, and she plays a critical role in articulating the value of Red Hat's product portfolio within the ecosystem, defining the strategy for partnering with Red Hat for customer success.
Ashesh Badani
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat
Ashesh Badani is the Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge.
His product responsibilities include Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.
Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.
Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.
Leigh Day
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat
Leigh Day is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Red Hat. Day started at Red Hat in 1999 as employee number 139, and was an integral part of the Marketing team that launched Red Hat into the enterprise with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2001. She then advanced into a pivotal leadership role—building an in-house Marketing Communications and Brand function responsible for simplifying, unifying and amplifying Red Hat’s unique messaging-voice to deliver noteworthy experiences for Red Hat customers and partners. In her role as CMO, Day established precision marketing as a standard practice at Red Hat, enhancing the Marketing team’s focus on the customer experience through data-driven and responsive strategies.
Under Day’s leadership, Red Hat launched Red Hat Summit in 2005, which has become the industry’s premier open source technology conference, in addition to many successful marketing programs like Command Line Heroes, redhat.com, Open Source Stories, Co.Lab, and more. She also led the Marketing team for more than 20 acquisitions at Red Hat, helping to expand awareness of our portfolio as it grew and evolved.
