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As IT leaders and business managers, we look beyond the current year to make strategic plans and prepare our organizations for what’s next. While AI is undoubtedly the focus for everyone going into 2026, it is equally important to ensure that the underlying technology platforms you AI adoption strategy and your investment decisions for the future. The choices we make now regarding our technology platforms will directly affect our agility, efficiency and ability to innovate in the years to come. We are delighted to see that a recent IDC analyst study not only confirms the value of an integrated platform approach, but also provides a comprehensive view, providing a good starting point for any organization’s forward-looking strategy.
The IDC newspaper, The Business Value of Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Solutionsconfirm that a unified hybrid cloud platform—consisting of a scalable operating system (OS), cloud application development platform, and enterprise-grade automation platform—delivers significant, measurable results and prepares your organization to support your AI adoption strategy. These findings come directly from in-depth interviews with Red Hat customers who outsource much of their IT operations to our hybrid cloud solutions.
Customers achieve:
- 74% faster execution of business change.
- 38% higher development team productivity, translating to an average annual profit of $54.45 million per organization.
- 60% faster lifecycle for new application development.
These metrics highlight the importance of choosing a fundamental platform that eliminates organizational and technological barriers and increases efficiency. As one customer noted:
“Instead of managing four vendors for different parts of the stack, we work with one.“
Another emphasized that Red Hat solutions must be a critical consideration for any innovative, AI-ready strategy. The customer said:
“Red Hat solutions give us massive agility. We have greatly increased our resilience and ability to scale infrastructure, achieving true elasticity.“
Your key considerations for 2026 planning
Following the insights in the IDC study, here are some key areas to focus on as you plan for the coming year:
- Standardize on an integrated platform: Building a more security-focused and stable foundation for business-critical workloads across your hybrid cloud environment ensures you have a consistent infrastructure, real-time visibility into system health, and faster incident response to improve application performance and reduce operational risk.
- Accelerate your innovation: Choose a platform that empowers your developers to build, test and deploy code faster and more reliably to enable faster release cycles and higher quality application delivery.
- Optimize your resources: Focus on solutions that standardize environments, automate provisioning and streamline deployment processes across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure to deliver faster responses to business demands, reduce operational bottlenecks and enable continuous improvement and innovation.
- Strengthen your security posture: As your IT environment grows, a unified platform can help you more effectively enforce security policies, reduce risk exposure, and streamline audit preparation while keeping up with changing industry regulations.
The IDC study provides a clear path forward, showing how an integrated platform can help you achieve significant gains in IT infrastructure efficiency and accelerate time to market. I encourage you to read the full paper; it provides a blueprint for how to build a more agile, productive and cost-effective IT strategy that can drive your organization to success.
