Red Hat’s view of the hybrid cloud

2025 proved to be dynamic in the world of enterprise IT – from the full emergence of AI agents to the renewed demands of sovereigntythere was no shortage of storylines throughout the year. But that is looking behind us; looking ahead, what do we expect for 2026?

Several of Red Hat’s executives tackled this question to provide their views on the new year, focusing on the changing mindsets and priorities facing IT leaders in January. So let’s hear about them!

Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer

“Technology leaders are torn between many priorities, which will become even greater in 2026. They must encourage AI use to quickly realize ROI, while maintaining appropriate security and privacy measures. Then they must modernize and address technical debt, and further deploy in hybrid environments as sovereign IT interests soar. On top of all this, they must ensure that their teams are not fast and capable enough to meet this change. pace of AI development, we expect the value of an open platform that can scale to meet these dynamic, often competing priorities will be even more recognized in 2026. Red Hat aims to deliver this platform, built on a foundation of open source innovation with Linux and Kubernetes for native cloud and legacy applications, and then bring this trusted technology and expertise to any future technology and expertise that optimizes in an optimum on any cloud.”

Mike Ferris, Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Strategy Officer

“We’re reaching a tipping point where IT modernization is no longer just an efficiency goal. It’s quickly becoming about survival. Enterprises are caught between a rock and a hard place with the volatility of the virtualization market and the absolute imperative to adopt AI. These two-pronged pressures are exposing technical debt like never before, transforming it from a nagging innovation that can accelerate all operational costs while accelerating everything.

To succeed, enterprises will need technology that builds a bridge, connecting the reliable stability of existing systems with flexible, intelligent systems – think AI agents, for example – where we know innovation will happen in the future. Platforms that leverage existing investment in people and processes, while being adaptable to future capabilities, will lead industries forward. Postponing this work has always been risky, but in 2026 the stakes are even higher. “It really is now or never to build your technology foundation for the future.”

Brian Stevens, senior vice president and chief technology officer for AI

“Over the past three years, the industry has seen massive investments in the training of generative LLMs at frontier labs around the world. The result has been a wide selection of powerful reasoning models, which are now available as both open source and proprietary. In the past year, we have seen the emergence of agents, powered by these advanced reasoning models, and integrated into a broad data system for what means, for what means. 2026 is that the emphasis now shifts to inference platforms, which the production platforms imply running these agents scalable, efficient, reliable and secure Just as we did two decades ago with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, through Red Hat AI we provide the unified inference platform that enables not only any model, but also a cloud.

Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Engineering

“We are at the beginning of a new and chaotic technology era, where the rapid pace of generative AI innovation is changing the way every business operates. AI cannot be a solution in search of a problem; instead, AI adoption must be tied to current use cases. This means CIOs must ensure that those AI cases move from proof of concept to production. Because AI is moving so quickly to where AI is moving quickly to a new environment, businesses can immediately need to integrate environment realized on a common, stable and reliable platform As we move into 2026, this flexibility should be a focal point for CIOs: Open platforms that bridge heterogeneous systems, workloads (from traditional applications to AI agents) and requirements will be crucial.

Whatever 2026 holds for the world of enterprise technology, Red Hat will be ready to support our customers and partners. Whether it’s standardization on a Linux or application adopt platform that meets you where you are modern virtualization solutions or the delivery of a AI strategyRed Hat brings the trusted open innovation needed to turn proof-of-concepts into production systems.

Here’s to the new year!