Conference Description
Key Takeaways
- Full-day conference addressing enterprise AI deployment, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and security challenges
- Designed for senior IT leaders, enterprise architects, platform engineers, and security professionals
- Technical focus on Red Hat OpenShift, Ansible Automation Platform, and OpenShift Virtualization
- Hands-on labs alongside strategic executive discussions on infrastructure modernisation
- Particular relevance for regulated industries navigating compliance requirements during AI adoption
Introduction
Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 New York City brings together IT leaders and practitioners for a concentrated examination of enterprise open source technologies, artificial intelligence deployment, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Scheduled as a full-day event at the New York Hilton Midtown, the conference targets director-level decision-makers, enterprise architects, and technical executives grappling with the operational realities of modernising legacy systems while simultaneously adopting AI-driven workflows.
The timing reflects broader industry pressures. Organisations across finance, healthcare, and the public sector face mounting demands to accelerate AI adoption without compromising security postures or regulatory compliance. Meanwhile, the shift away from traditional virtualisation platforms has created urgency around container-based infrastructure and platform engineering practices. This event addresses these intersecting challenges through a combination of strategic keynotes, technical breakout sessions, and hands-on laboratory environments.
About This Event
The conference follows a format designed to serve both executive and practitioner audiences. Keynote presentations establish strategic context, while breakout sessions allow deeper exploration of specific technical domains. Hands-on labs provide direct experience with Red Hat’s technology portfolio, and executive roundtables facilitate peer discussions among senior leaders facing similar organisational challenges.
Networking opportunities are woven throughout the programme, recognising that peer connections often prove as valuable as formal content. The event structure acknowledges that enterprise technology decisions rarely occur in isolation—they require alignment between technical feasibility, business objectives, and operational constraints.
Enterprise AI Deployment and Infrastructure Modernisation
Artificial intelligence and machine learning form a central thread throughout the programme, though the focus extends well beyond algorithmic capabilities. Enterprise AI deployment introduces substantial infrastructure requirements—compute resources, data pipelines, model serving environments, and governance frameworks—that many organisations find challenging to implement at scale.
Sessions examine how AI workloads integrate with existing hybrid cloud environments, addressing practical questions around resource allocation, cost management, and operational complexity. The relationship between AI adoption and platform engineering receives particular attention, as organisations increasingly recognise that successful AI initiatives depend on robust underlying infrastructure rather than isolated model development.
Red Hat AI and IBM watsonx Fusion represent key technologies in this space, offering enterprise-grade frameworks for deploying and managing AI workloads within OpenShift environments. The integration between these platforms and existing automation tooling creates pathways for organisations to operationalise AI without building entirely separate infrastructure stacks.
Security, Compliance, and Software Supply Chain Integrity
Security considerations permeate the conference agenda, reflecting the expanded threat surfaces that accompany modern distributed architectures. Software supply chain security has emerged as a critical concern following high-profile incidents that demonstrated how vulnerabilities in upstream dependencies can cascade through enterprise environments.
The programme addresses these challenges through sessions on compliance automation, security policy enforcement, and observability practices that enable organisations to maintain visibility across complex hybrid environments. For regulated industries, the intersection of security requirements and compliance obligations creates particular complexity—financial services organisations must satisfy both cybersecurity frameworks and industry-specific regulations, while healthcare entities navigate HIPAA requirements alongside broader security best practices.
Red Hat’s approach emphasises security as an integrated characteristic of the platform rather than an afterthought. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a hardened foundation, while OpenShift incorporates security controls throughout the container lifecycle. Ansible Automation Platform enables consistent policy enforcement across heterogeneous environments, reducing the manual effort required to maintain security postures at scale.
Automation and Operational Efficiency
Automation serves as both a standalone topic and an enabling capability that supports other conference themes. Ansible Automation Platform features prominently, with sessions exploring how organisations can reduce operational burden, improve consistency, and accelerate delivery cycles through systematic automation of routine tasks.
The business case for automation has strengthened as organisations face pressure to expand capabilities without proportional increases in headcount. Automation enables existing teams to manage larger, more complex environments while reducing the operational risk associated with manual processes. Red Hat Lightspeed, which brings AI-assisted capabilities to automation workflows, represents an evolution in how practitioners interact with automation tooling.
Beyond individual task automation, the programme examines how automation practices integrate with platform engineering approaches. Self-service capabilities, standardised deployment patterns, and automated compliance checks collectively reduce friction for development teams while maintaining governance requirements.
Hybrid Cloud and Virtualisation Strategies
Hybrid cloud infrastructure remains a practical reality for most large enterprises, which must balance workload placement across on-premises data centres, public cloud providers, and edge locations. The conference addresses the operational challenges of managing these distributed environments, including consistency, observability, and cost optimisation.
OpenShift Virtualization receives significant attention as organisations evaluate pathways away from traditional virtualisation platforms. The technology enables virtual machine workloads to run alongside containers within OpenShift environments, providing a migration path that does not require immediate application refactoring. This approach acknowledges that many enterprise workloads will remain virtualised for the foreseeable future, even as organisations adopt container-native architectures for new development.
Project Lightwell and Red Hat Satellite address management and lifecycle concerns for distributed infrastructure, while Podman Desktop supports local development workflows that align with production container environments.
Industry Context and Technology Partnerships
The sponsor and partner ecosystem reflects the collaborative nature of enterprise technology delivery. Hardware partners including Intel, AMD, HPE, and Cisco provide the compute foundation on which Red Hat’s software stack operates. Cloud providers AWS and Microsoft represent deployment targets for hybrid architectures, while storage and data protection vendors such as Portworx by Pure Storage and Veeam address persistence and resilience requirements.
Systems integrators and channel partners including CDW, TD Synnex, Arctiq, and IIS Technology play essential roles in enterprise deployments, providing implementation expertise and ongoing support. SAP’s presence acknowledges the significant installed base of SAP workloads running on Red Hat infrastructure, while Percona addresses database requirements for organisations seeking open source alternatives.
This ecosystem approach recognises that enterprise technology decisions involve multiple vendors and integration points. The conference provides opportunities for attendees to understand how these components work together in production environments.
Who Should Attend
The programme serves multiple audience segments with distinct interests. IT decision-makers at director level and above will find strategic content addressing technology investment priorities and organisational transformation. Enterprise architects can explore reference architectures and integration patterns across the Red Hat portfolio. Platform engineers and DevOps professionals benefit from hands-on labs and technical deep-dives into specific products and capabilities.
Security and compliance officers will find relevant content on software supply chain integrity, policy automation, and regulatory alignment. Cloud and infrastructure managers can examine hybrid deployment strategies and cost optimisation approaches. AI and ML engineers seeking to understand enterprise deployment considerations will find practical guidance on operationalising models within production environments.
Organisations in regulated industries—financial services, healthcare, and public sector—face particular complexity in balancing innovation with compliance obligations, making the conference’s integrated treatment of these topics especially relevant.