Conference Description
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise IT conference focusing on hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, and automation technologies
- Designed for IT decision-makers, cloud architects, DevOps engineers, and technology partners across the Middle East
- Technical programme includes hands-on labs, keynotes, customer case studies, and ecosystem panels
- Addresses infrastructure modernisation, container adoption, secure software supply chains, and AI lifecycle management
- Supported by major technology vendors including Intel, HPE, Morohub, GBM, NetApp, and others
Introduction
Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 Dubai brings together IT professionals, business leaders, and technology partners to examine the current state of enterprise infrastructure and emerging approaches to digital transformation. The in-person event targets organisations navigating the complexities of hybrid cloud adoption, artificial intelligence integration, and large-scale automation. With enterprises across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the broader Middle East accelerating their modernisation efforts, the conference addresses timely challenges around legacy system migration, containerised workloads, and operational security.
The programme combines executive-level strategic content with practitioner-focused technical sessions, reflecting the reality that successful IT transformation requires alignment between leadership vision and engineering execution. Attendees gain exposure to both vendor perspectives and real-world customer implementations, providing a balanced view of what modern enterprise architecture looks like in practice.
About This Event
Red Hat Summit: Connect is the regional extension of Red Hat’s flagship annual conference, adapted for the Middle Eastern market. The Dubai edition serves as a gathering point for the local technology ecosystem, bringing together enterprise customers, system integrators, and independent software vendors operating in the region.
The event format balances several content types. Keynote presentations establish broader industry context and strategic direction, while breakout sessions allow deeper exploration of specific technical domains. Customer perspective sessions offer case studies from organisations that have undertaken significant modernisation projects, providing attendees with practical insights into implementation challenges and outcomes. Hands-on labs give engineers and architects direct experience with platforms and tools, moving beyond theoretical discussion into applied learning.
Ecosystem panels bring together technology partners to discuss how different solutions integrate and complement one another. This reflects the reality of modern enterprise IT, where organisations rarely rely on a single vendor but instead assemble capabilities from multiple providers to meet their specific requirements.
Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Modernisation
A central theme throughout the conference is the ongoing shift from traditional virtualised environments to hybrid cloud architectures. Many enterprises in the region continue to operate substantial VMware estates and legacy infrastructure that require careful migration planning. The event addresses this transition directly, examining strategies for moving workloads to containerised platforms while maintaining operational stability.
Red Hat OpenShift features prominently as the container orchestration platform underpinning many modernisation initiatives. The technology enables organisations to run applications consistently across on-premises data centres and public cloud environments, including AWS Marketplace and Microsoft Azure Marketplace deployments. This flexibility matters particularly for enterprises with data residency requirements or those pursuing gradual cloud adoption rather than wholesale migration.
Infrastructure discussions extend to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which remains foundational for many enterprise workloads. Sessions explore how organisations can standardise their operating environment while accommodating diverse application requirements, from traditional monolithic systems to cloud-native microservices architectures.
Artificial Intelligence and the Enterprise AI Lifecycle
The integration of artificial intelligence into enterprise operations represents one of the most significant shifts in IT strategy currently underway. The conference examines AI not as an isolated capability but as a discipline requiring infrastructure, governance, and operational frameworks to deliver sustainable value.
Red Hat AI receives attention as part of the broader discussion around operationalising machine learning and generative AI workloads. The challenge for most organisations extends beyond model development to encompass deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management at scale. Sessions address how container platforms and automation tools support these requirements, enabling data science teams and platform engineers to collaborate effectively.
The event recognises that AI adoption varies significantly across organisations. Some attendees represent AI-first startups building their entire technology stack around machine learning capabilities, while others come from established enterprises exploring initial use cases. Content is structured to serve both audiences, covering foundational concepts alongside advanced implementation patterns.
Automation, DevSecOps, and Platform Engineering
Scaling IT operations without proportional increases in headcount requires systematic automation. The conference dedicates significant attention to automation strategies, with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform serving as a key technology for discussion. Ansible’s agentless architecture and human-readable playbook format have made it widely adopted for configuration management, application deployment, and infrastructure provisioning.
The programme connects automation to broader operational models including AIOps, where machine learning assists in identifying and resolving infrastructure issues, and DevSecOps, which integrates security practices throughout the software development lifecycle rather than treating them as a final gate before deployment. These approaches reflect industry recognition that speed and security need not be opposing forces when processes are properly designed.
Platform engineering emerges as a related theme, addressing how organisations can provide internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity while maintaining governance and compliance requirements. This discipline has gained prominence as enterprises seek to give development teams self-service capabilities without sacrificing operational control.
Securing the Software Supply Chain
Software supply chain security has moved from a specialist concern to a board-level priority following high-profile incidents affecting organisations worldwide. The conference addresses this topic directly, examining how enterprises can establish visibility and control over the components that comprise their applications.
Modern applications typically incorporate numerous open source libraries and third-party dependencies, each representing potential vulnerability if not properly managed. Sessions explore approaches to software composition analysis, vulnerability scanning, and provenance verification that help organisations understand what they are deploying and where risks may exist. The integration of these security practices into continuous integration and deployment pipelines ensures that protection scales alongside development velocity.
Technology Ecosystem and Partner Perspectives
The conference brings together a substantial ecosystem of technology vendors and system integrators. Diamond-level participants include Intel, Morohub, and HPE, each bringing distinct capabilities in compute hardware, infrastructure solutions, and hybrid cloud platforms. Gold-level participants GBM, Integra, and NetApp contribute expertise in regional systems integration and enterprise storage. Additional participants including Ingram, Redington, Redis, Veeam, and Portworx round out the ecosystem with distribution, caching, data protection, and storage orchestration capabilities.
This partner presence reflects how enterprise IT projects typically unfold. Organisations rarely implement solutions in isolation but instead work with integrators who understand local requirements and vendors whose technologies address specific technical challenges. The event facilitates these connections, enabling attendees to evaluate potential partners and understand how different solutions work together.
Who Should Attend
The event serves multiple constituencies within enterprise IT organisations. Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers gain strategic perspective on technology trends and peer insights into how other organisations approach similar challenges. IT Directors responsible for infrastructure and operations find practical guidance on modernisation approaches and vendor evaluation.
Cloud architects and engineers benefit from technical deep-dives into container platforms, automation frameworks, and hybrid cloud architectures. DevOps and platform engineering teams discover approaches to improving developer experience while maintaining operational standards. Security professionals explore supply chain protection and DevSecOps integration. Application developers learn how modern platforms support their work and what skills will prove valuable as architectures evolve.
The event particularly suits organisations in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and broader Middle East region, where digital transformation initiatives continue to accelerate across government entities, large enterprises, and technology-focused startups. Attendees leave with both strategic frameworks and tactical knowledge applicable to their specific modernisation journeys.