In this CIONET Trailblazer article, Stef Schampaert, Country Managing Director of Red Hat Belgium & Luxembourg shares insights into Red Hat's journey, their strategic focus areas, and how they empower organisations to innovate confidently in an ever-changing tech landscape. Key topics include Red Hat’s approach to hybrid cloud, the evolution of OpenShift, and its role in AI-driven development.
You have been with Red Hat for 9 years—how has the company evolved in that time, especially in the context of the ever-changing technology landscape?
Long time indeed and of course our focus has somewhat shifted over those years. We have moved away from, for example, our Middleware stack and have focused on broadening and deepening our portfolio with Ansible Automation as well as deep developments in container management and security with OpenShift. All this while remaining true to what still makes us unique as a technology leader: remaining 100% committed to our development in Open Source.
Additionally, we have seen the growing importance of the Cloud and, with that, security. We are proud that our investments with the 3 top Public Cloud vendors -Microsoft, AWS and Google - have resulted in us being recognised by Gartner as a leader in container management! It underpins our strategy as the true hybrid cloud player in the container space, enabling customers to bring together all their choices, be it on-prem or in any cloud. This strategy is also reflected in our strategy of standardising, automating and then innovating.
This year, Red Hat is organising a summit with three key tracks: Infra & Ops, OpenShift, and Dev & AI. Could you walk us through how these tracks reflect Red Hat’s strategic focus and its approach to the future of technology?
Sure! We still clearly bridge the gap between Dev and Ops with our OpenShift platform - having added a deep security layer on top to cover not only the DevOps perspective but to truly support a DevSecOps strategy our customers are looking for. This approach resonates with our Enterprise customers who are willing to explain how it supports their particular infra and developer needs.
AI is key in everything we do. We are adding an AI layer to all our solutions:’, from RHEL AI to Ansible and Openshift AI, our latest addition to ensure companies can build, deploy, run and train their LLMs in a standard, cloud-native way.
It is obvious though that we cannot do this alone - hence some really great collaborations with the likes of Dell and Accenture. The latter has created an AI-in-the-box solution based on Dell HW and Red Hat's OpenShift AI to offer its customers the best enterprise platform to run their generative AI applications co-built by Accenture and its customers.
OpenShift has become a flagship product for Red Hat. In your view, what makes it a critical part of the modern enterprise, and how has it evolved to meet new challenges?
OpenShift has indeed become a flagship solution for our Red Hat customers. Nevertheless, let's not forget that Red Hat Enterprise Linux forms the foundation of containers. Containers are Linux and Linux are containers. Our long-standing investment in RHEL makes OpenShift the best Enterprise Container Platform available. The enhancements with deep security features and recently AI mark the importance and strategic direction of OpenShift. In true Open Source style, Red Hat continues to add rich features to OpenShift, working closely with our communities, to ensure customers the best experience and platform for supporting their Cloud-driven ambitions.
Cloud natives are definitely the direction many customers have chosen to develop new and exciting applications - often enriched with AI - to serve their customers better. That is exactly the choice we made so many years ago when we entered the container technology market. We still are - next to Google, the biggest contributor to Kubernetes.
Next to this, we see a lot of demand for our OpenShift Virtualisation. The costs to manage a virtualisation infrastructure are rising, along with the pressure to innovate. The budget allocated for virtualisation costs could be better spent on migrating to a platform like OpenShift, which is future-proof and can support innovations like AI and cloud-native development.
Long deployment times and a lack of developer tools can get in the way of scaling and modernising virtualised applications. You need a platform that promotes modern development practices, including full life cycle automation, and scalable management for all of your applications. Managing multiple platforms across on-premise and cloud environments introduces sprawl, complexity, and inconsistencies. Instead of migrating VMs to one environment while running containers in another, migrate and manage VMs and containers within a consistent platform for developers and platform engineers.
Dev & AI is another central track at the summit. What role do you see Red Hat playing in the intersection of AI and software development? How are you helping companies adapt to these new technologies?
When looking somewhat deeper into our commitment to utilise and support AI-driven development, we differentiate 3 different AI-supporting solutions offered to our customers:
Data scientists and developers can rapidly deploy and monitor ML workloads and models on-premise and in the public cloud through a fully supported and standardised environment.
The Red Hat LightSpeed portfolio will include OpenShift LightSpeed, a gen AI-based virtual assistant to troubleshoot problems and get help. Additionally, the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux LightSpeed aims to demystify building, deploying and managing Linux.
The rise of AI in software development again underpins the importance of having a standardised, Cloud native but hybrid platform like OpenShift to bring together Dev(Sec)Ops and AI development.
Infrastructure and Operations are foundational for digital transformation. What trends or challenges are you seeing in this space, and how does RedHat plan to address them?
So true, and when you add AI to the equation, Infrastructure and Operations become even more intertwined if The hybrid Cloud is another critical factor, with On-Prem capabilities remaining crucial. - At Red Hat, we are focused on solutions that blend into the hybrid strategy of so many customers. Our huge ecosystem of partners provides deep knowledge to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together and to guide customers in their journey towards this new era of applications.
Looking ahead, what is your vision for Red Hat’s role in the tech industry, both in Belgium and globally? How do you see your customers' needs evolving over the next few years?
A lot of customers realise that the complexity of Cloud, AI, Cloud native applications, true automation, security and so many other aspects of modern and innovative infrastructures force them to look for guidance and help. We, together with our partners, are becoming more and more of a true guide to help them navigate to real innovation, ensuring they do not miss crucial steps in their journey.
As a company, we will continue to collaborate further in the Open Source communities, which, in my opinion, becomes even more important as we move forward. We will continue to focus on open standards, truly open source innovation and collaborating with existing and new companies to jointly ensure innovation is brought to our enterprise customers.
Lastly, what can attendees expect to gain from participating in the summit? Are there any key takeaways or insights you hope to provide through these tracks?
More than 500 people - to date - have subscribed to attend our summit. We kindly invite them to openly connect with each other and learn how other customers have solved their challenges by using Red Hat technology and our partners' technological knowledge. On PowerPoint, everything works but it is only in a true environment that one will see the value of the technologies we bring to the market. And there is no better reference than a customer reference. We are truly grateful that so many of our customers want to speak at our event to help others understand how Red Hat solutions helped them overcome their modern IT challenges.
Red Hat's hybrid cloud journey, as shared by Stef Schampaert, is about empowering organisations to innovate securely and confidently. With a commitment to open-source leadership, Red Hat ensures its customers are equipped to navigate the evolving tech landscape.
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