OpenShift: Consistent integration for the hybrid enterprise

The experimentation phase of the cloud-native era has ended. Today, it is not questioned that Kubernetes sits at the center of the enterprise landscape, and Red Hat OpenShift is the leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by that technology. Over the years we have grown OpenShift down into the infrastructure, up into the developer experience, and across to platform engineering. Right now AI, sovereignty, virtualization, software development practices, and public to regional clouds have created a new demand on people’s existing solutions. We have spent years building for this moment.

The value of Red Hat OpenShift lies in its ubiquity. It provides a layer of consistency for the hybrid enterprise. We engineered this platform to enhance the investments you have made around it, stretching from on-premises data centers to vertical markets to every major public cloud and out to the edge. This allows organizations to prioritize business logic over provider limitations because they have a unified experience regardless of where code lives.

This week at the Red Hat Summit, we celebrate our customers.  We see this transformation in action with EUROCONTROL, which is replacing 25-year-old legacy systems with a modern architecture built on Red Hat OpenShift. By modernizing its IT backbone, EUROCONTROL can scale digital services between on-premises and regional sovereign clouds to support over 12 million annual flights. Telenet Business followed a similar path, migrating its private cloud infrastructure to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to regain architectural freedom from a proprietary stack. By unifying VMs and containers on one platform, they serve over 10,000 customers with a single operational model that extends to overseeing AI models at scale.

This momentum represents a massive vote of confidence from leading innovators across industries. In 2025 alone, the number of VMs running on Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization grew by 417%. During that same period, clusters running VMs increased by 93%, and accounts running VMs grew by 70%.

While these specific milestones highlight our growth in key areas like virtualization, they are part of a much larger story. Recently, Red Hat OpenShift surpassed $2 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). For our customers, this milestone is an industry stability metric: it represents a platform used by thousands of companies and millions of end users, creating a massive, reliable ecosystem that people can build their careers—and businesses—upon.

While some market players are retracting or second-guessing their technology choices, we are accelerating. If you're required to adopt a high-effort migration just to keep your infrastructure running, you aren't getting a feature; you’re paying a tax.

We believe organizations need a choice in how they work, which is why we offer a choice instead of a mandate. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization lets you run VMs and containers on one foundation without being bound to only one operational pattern. Whether you decide to modernize your VMs with cloud native best practices such as GitOps or horizontal application design, or lift and shift them as they are today in order to consolidate costs into one platform investment, OpenShift offers a platform that can solve both and lead to AI and agentic solutions. To amplify this focus on choice, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is now available across all cloud providers, delivering flexibility regardless of where your workloads reside. Additionally, for VM-first organizations, we offer Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a dedicated option focused entirely on virtualization workloads. At Red Hat we do not ask you to adopt optional features you never requested. Instead, we provide the most options with the fewest constraints. 

Innovation is moving faster than ever, fueled by the dual requirements of AI and digital sovereignty. Red Hat OpenShift provides a foundation to unify these disparate workloads, helping leaders manage everything from virtual machines (VMs) to modern containers with operational confidence. Because the platform prioritizes security at every layer, developers can move quickly without the red tape that typically slows them down.

The next stage of this foundation is the transition from a managed platform to an intelligent one. Our journey has led us to this moment: the creation of a truly intelligent, sovereign, and unified application platform. We are building more intelligence into the core of OpenShift than ever before, ensuring that your infrastructure isn't just a place to run code, but a strategic asset that adapts to your needs. This evolution focuses on critical milestones that define the next decade of IT:

• Agentic intelligence: We are integrating agentic AI throughout OpenShift to act as a force multiplier for your operational staff. These capabilities provide the intelligence needed to accelerate troubleshooting and resource optimization. Your users may spend less time directly inside the console, not because the platform matters less, but because the agents working on their behalf will have the access and context they need to act effectively for your business.
• Sovereignty: We are proactively addressing global security threats and regulatory requirements through advanced cryptography, confidential computing, and new hard partitioning inside clusters giving you control over your data in any jurisdiction.
• Frictionless developer experience: By removing bureaucratic hurdles and providing a rich set of platform engineering tooling focused on helping developers accelerate through their software delivery life cycle (SDLC) while still leveraging any application pattern, we enable developers to move from code to production with zero interruption.

If you are interested in taking an early look at some of what we are doing for the rest of 2026, sign up for our early access newsletter here.

OpenShift lets you innovate without interruption. What you create now, you can build on later across the full spectrum of AI, sovereignty, virtualization, and software development practices. Our vision is built on the belief that you should never be locked out of your own roadmap. By focusing on engineering stability and predictable lifecycles, we move the industry toward a future built on choice and flexibility. Our customers can pivot when the market demands it because they are already standing on a foundation that can go anywhere. Red Hat OpenShift turns application platforms into engines for autonomous innovation, giving you the intelligence and sovereign control to run your business on your own terms.