Red Hat Summit 2026: AI, Virtualization, Ansible Updates Signal Partner Opportunity

‘Red Hat is the only platform that makes hybrid a genuine first-class architecture, not an afterthought,’ says Red Hat Chief Product Officer and Senior Vice President Ashesh Badani.

The upcoming Red Hat AI 3.4. Closer integration with chipmaker giant Nvidia. And Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 on the horizon.

These are some of the biggest reveals during Red Hat’s annual Summit conference, which runs through Thursday in Atlanta. The Raleigh, N.C.-based enterprise-grade open-source tools vendor held its conference one week after parent IBM’s Think 2026.

Red Hat Chief Product Officer and Senior Vice President Ashesh Badani said in his keynote address that the vendor is investing deeply in its systems integrator ecosystem to help address the “virtualization cost crisis.” Badani didn’t name VMware by Broadcom, but the virtualization vendor’s price changes have fueled a variety of solution providers and their customers to seek alternatives like Red Hat.

“When you think about this holistically, this isn’t a migration from one VM platform to another,” he said. “It’s a migration, really, from a virtualization strategy to a modernization strategy.”

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What Red Hat Summit 2026 Delivered For Partners

Badani played down the benefits of customers moving everything onto the hyperscalers of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, saying that users lose consistency because of the different operational model, tooling, security models and networking primitives on each cloud. Red Hat OpenShift gives users a unified operating model on private infrastructure, on the edge, in disconnected and regulated environments and elsewhere.

Going all in on hyperscalers also reduces customer flexibility and negotiating leverage, Badani said. Red Hat tools aim to prevent vendor lock-in. And hybrid cloud remains the only strategy for certain regulated industries.

“Red Hat is the only platform that makes hybrid a genuine first-class architecture, not an afterthought,” he said.

Bo Gebbie, president of Hamel, Minn.-based IBM and Red Hat solution provider Evolving Solutions—No. 162 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that Red Hat’s virtualization portfolio has been an enticing alternative for VMware users that do not like the company’s pricing changes.

Evolving Solutions has also seen customer demand for Red Hat’s automation products as a way to keep costs in check and remove human-influenced risk and security concerns, he said.

“As you think about just people cost increasing, you think about AI workloads—the automation side is needed for all of that,” Gebbie said.

IBM and various divisions of its portfolio, including Confluent and Red Hat, have been investing in their partner programs to seize opportunities in AI, data streaming and hybrid cloud.

Red Hat, for example, is looking to add core sales training, core technical training, sales tools and other capabilities throughout the year to help partners with its AI portfolio, according to CRN’s 2026 Partner Program Guide.

Confluent this year looks to increase the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel and increase the amount of professional services going through partners, according to CRN’s 2026 Channel Chiefs.

During Red Hat parent IBM’s latest quarterly earnings, the vendor revealed that the Red Hat and hybrid cloud business, part of its software segment, grew 10 percent year on year. Red Hat’s subscription business accelerated and saw revenue under contract grow double digits.

Red Hat OpenShift accelerated and saw $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, with overall percentage growth in the high 20s. And Red Hat’s consumption business returned to expectations.

Virtualization Push Targets VMware Disruption

In the last year, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization assessed more than 1.1 million virtual machines and migrated nearly 400,000 VMs as Red Hat and its solution providers saw an uptick in customers, Badani said in his keynote. The number of VMs running on OpenShift Virtualization grew more than fivefold in 2025. Clusters running VMs almost doubled. And customers running VMs grew 70 percent.

Red Hat Virtualization is now north of $600 billion annual recurring revenue, parent company IBM revealed during its latest quarterly earnings.

In answer to a CRN question during a virtual press briefing, Michael Barrett, Red Hat vice president and general manager of hybrid platforms, said that virtualization continues to present opportunities for Red Hat solution providers. “Daily, I'm involved in a global service integrator that wants to talk about how their deployment is going for a customer that’s doing a virtualization integration,” he said.

Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks told CRN in an interview that his company’s position as a virtualization alternative to legacy providers like VMware “is a tremendous market opportunity” for solution providers. Getting a foot in the door through OpenShift Virtualization leads into a platform to modernize other parts of the customers’ IT estate.

Red Hat virtualization solution providers see “multiple wins that they get out of what was just a frustrating opening position—’My virtualization costs just went up a ton, and I wasn’t planning on dealing with that. And now I've been able to turn that into a win,’” said Hicks.

Red Hat Desktop, Developer Tools

A Red Hat Desktop option is now generally available with commercial support for the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop. And the vendor has enhanced its Advanced Developer Suite.

Red Hat Desktop allows for isolated AI agent sandboxing to prevent unverified agent actions from affecting the host operating system. The Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite now has trusted, curated Python libraries and AI-driven exploit intelligence to modernize security across the software supply chain.

Red Hat revealed that it plans to provide cooperative community support for the Fedora Hummingbird Linux project. Making that support available through a Red Hat subscription aims to enable users to find the right community resources faster, according to the vendor.

The vendor is also working to deliver Fedora Hummingbird Linux as a default option across developer-focused cloud providers that are typically used to launch personal production and second-stage proof-of-concept projects, according to Red Hat.

Hicks told CRN that Red Hat Desktop looks to simplify the “otherworldly complicated infrastructure” behind running AI workloads and helps solution providers think about full life cycles, not just box deployment.

“How do you start as a developer on something that will mimic [production environments]—-that has always been a developer cycle challenge,” Hicks said. “But if you don’t get good at that, you’re kidding yourself that you’re going to build your own agents with it.”

Sovereignty, Security, Data Control

As part of Red Hat’s Summit 2026 announcements, the vendor made its Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support premium, in-region operational service for preventing jurisdictional boundary violations generally available.

Confirmed Sovereign Support is now available in the U.S. and European Union. Red Hat has more region rollouts planned, according to the vendor.

A zero-trust workload identity manager is now available for users looking to enhance containerized workload security, according to Red Hat. The vendor expects to extend the manager to AI agents in a future release, giving them unique identities that make autonomous decisions traceable.

The OpenShift road map includes expanded controls for stronger integrity, with plans for attestation for Red Hat CoreOS 10 nodes, support for confidential virtual machines in OpenShift Virtualization to secure data in use for more workload types, expanded use of next-generation encryption algorithms for post-quantum cryptography and an AI bill of materials to help verify lineage and provenance to proactively mitigate bias, tampering, supply chain vulnerabilities and other risks.

In answer to a CRN question during a virtual press briefing, Barrett said that vendor MSPs and service integrators at all levels see opportunities in sovereignty. “We spend a lot of time with them on that,” he said.

Red Hat AI 3.4

Coming later this month is Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia updates and Red Hat AI 3.4. Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia software is already available. The latest RHEL for Nvidia drivers and specialized builds are accessible through Red Hat’s Customer Portal, according to the vendor.

Red Hat AI 3.4 aims to provide scalable, high-performance inference with governed model access, streamlined agent operations for the autonomous application life cycle, prompt management and integrated safety and security for models and agents, according to the vendor.

Governed Model as a Service allows for curated, validated model delivery with standard OpenAI-compatible interfaces. A framework-agnostic evaluation hub provides a unified control plane for evaluating large language models, AI applications and agents, according to Red Hat. And 3.4 enables production-ready observability for agent execution, end-to-end tracing of LLM calls, reasoning steps, tool execution, model responses and token usage through OpenTelemetry.

Also generally available is Red Hat Hardened Images, a no-cost catalog of micro-sized components with the goal of helping organizations pursuing zero-CVE strategies.

On May 22, Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud becomes generally available with a goal of helping clients reliably integrate real-time AI inferencing directly into production workflows across hybrid cloud environments.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service on IBM Cloud, another managed service, has entered limited availability. IBM and Red Hat expect to make the service generally available in June. Through this service, users can standardize the orchestration, performance and governance of AI models enterprisewide while freeing developers and platform teams to focus on delivering the value-added applications and services, according to the vendors.

In answer to a CRN question during a virtual press briefing, Joe Fernandes, Red Hat vice president and general manager for the AI business unit, said that solution providers should explore value-adds through Red Hat AI Inference Service on IBM Cloud as an example.

“We see just inference service providers—whether that’s their only business or whether it’s neoclouds expanding into inference or whether it’s the hyperscalers—we see a lot of growing demand there,” Fernandes said. “Not just because of getting access to models, but more importantly, getting access to agents that are going to really drive those models and drive inference demand through the roof.”

Red Hat is also at work on more Agent-as-a-Service capabilities that open up new engagement options between solution providers and their customers, Fernandes said.

Ansible Automation Platform 2.7

In the coming weeks, Red Hat will make its Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform version 2.7 available. Its automation orchestrator will become available later in the year.

Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 looks to operationalize AI agents at enterprise scale as a trusted execution layer for agentic era IT operations, according to the vendor. Combined with the automation orchestrator now in technology preview, Ansible Platform users will have the ability to connect model outputs to existing infrastructure with policy-driven governance and precision of operational actions.

Platform users can generate more contextual AI responses with an automation intelligent assistant. Users can inject organization-specific information and use Model Context Protocol servers for Ansible to simplify AI-driven automation without custom integrations.

In answer to a CRN question during a virtual press briefing, Sathish Balakrishnan, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Ansible business unit, said that Red Hat’s automation portfolio can help MSPs and systems integrators rise above cost pressures.

“It is a great time to be in automation,” he said. “We can solve all of these things with zero touch, and also how to be confident in bringing all the AI knowledge that’s coming into IT operations and, plus, put it into effect on your production systems. That’s basically a great opportunity for all of our partners.”

These tools also help address cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with customers increasingly turning to solution providers to handle common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) in the software platforms which run on top of Red Hat.

“Automation is super critical,” Balakrishnan said. “Customers are not looking to patch anymore once a quarter or once in six months. They want to really patch almost every day because they’re so scared about it.”

RHEL Updates

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 and 9.8 are slated for release “in the near future,” according to the vendor.

These versions of RHEL aim to provide a strategic and durable operating system platform that unifies IT operations across the hybrid cloud with security, according to the vendor.

Red Hat plans to make its Red Hat Enterprise Linux Long-Life Add-On available this summer. Among the product innovations now generally available for Red Hat users is RHEL for Nvidia 26.01, which promises users better support for Nvidia architectures.

The first iteration supports Nvidia Blackwell. The vendors are at work co-engineering future releases for the upcoming Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. Nvidia Run:ai is also now available to Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia customers, and Red Hat Device Edge is now available to run on Nvidia Jetson Orin.

The vendor has released a development preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) on Nvidia DGX Spark as a high-performance AI developer workstation for local agentic AI workloads at the edge.

“Partners can take advantage of a variety of cadences and really treat the Red Hat offerings, the RHEL offerings, as a trusted source of software for their higher-order solutions,” Gunnar Hellekson, Red Hat’s vice president and general manager for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business, said in answer to a CRN question during a virtual press briefing.

“The addition of this fast-moving track, this fast-moving sibling brand, really expands the amount of opportunity that they have,” Hellekson said.

RHEL did decelerate in growth in the latest quarter due in part to the U.S. federal government shutdown and the hardware supply chain market.

IBM is monitoring the RHEL business for vulnerability to rising memory prices and component shortages due to the technology’s tie to enterprise hardware placements, executives said during the latest quarterly earnings call.