Conference Description
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise-focused conference addressing artificial intelligence adoption, data sovereignty and hybrid cloud strategy
- Designed for IT leaders, architects, developers and technical professionals from large organisations
- Covers open source innovation, automation, application modernisation, security and edge computing
- Features keynotes, technical breakout sessions, product demonstrations and expert consultations
- Held at Transamerica Expo Center in São Paulo, Brazil
Introduction
Red Hat Summit: Connect 2026 São Paulo brings together enterprise IT professionals to examine how organisations can maintain strategic control over their technology infrastructure while adopting artificial intelligence at scale. The conference addresses a pressing concern for technology leaders across Latin America: how to leverage AI capabilities without surrendering data sovereignty or becoming locked into proprietary ecosystems. As enterprises face mounting pressure to modernise their operations, the event provides a forum for exploring open source approaches to digital transformation that preserve organisational autonomy.
About This Event
This in-person conference takes place at the Transamerica Expo Center in São Paulo, one of Brazil’s premier venues for large-scale technology gatherings. The programme combines keynote presentations from industry leaders with hands-on technical sessions, customer case studies and opportunities for direct consultation with product specialists. Attendees can expect a mix of strategic discussions aimed at executive decision-makers alongside deep technical content for architects and practitioners implementing these technologies in production environments.
The event structure reflects the dual nature of enterprise technology decisions, where business strategy and technical implementation must align. Keynote sessions establish broader themes around AI adoption and digital sovereignty, while breakout tracks allow participants to explore specific technologies and use cases relevant to their organisations.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Sovereignty
The conference places particular emphasis on the intersection of AI adoption and data sovereignty, a combination that has become increasingly significant as organisations deploy machine learning workloads that process sensitive information. For enterprises in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and the public sector, the question of where data resides and who controls the underlying infrastructure has moved from a compliance checkbox to a strategic imperative.
Data sovereignty concerns extend beyond simple geographic considerations. Organisations must evaluate whether their AI platforms allow them to inspect, modify and migrate workloads without vendor permission. Open source approaches offer transparency into how systems operate, enabling security teams to audit code and compliance officers to verify data handling practices. This visibility becomes particularly valuable as AI regulations evolve across different jurisdictions.
The programme explores how Red Hat AI integrates with existing enterprise infrastructure, allowing organisations to run AI workloads on their own terms. Sessions examine practical considerations around model training, inference deployment and the operational challenges of maintaining AI systems in production environments.
Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Modernisation
Hybrid cloud architecture remains central to enterprise IT strategy, and the conference addresses how organisations can build consistent platforms spanning on-premises data centres, public cloud providers and edge locations. Red Hat OpenShift features prominently in these discussions as a container orchestration platform that provides a common operational model across diverse infrastructure.
The technical sessions cover application modernisation pathways, helping organisations understand how to migrate legacy workloads to containerised environments without disrupting business operations. This transition often proves more complex than initial assessments suggest, requiring careful attention to stateful applications, database dependencies and integration patterns that evolved over years of organic growth.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux underpins much of this infrastructure discussion, providing the operating system foundation that supports both traditional and cloud-native workloads. For organisations managing thousands of servers across multiple environments, consistency at the operating system level simplifies security patching, compliance reporting and operational procedures.
Automation and Operational Efficiency
IT automation has progressed from a convenience to a necessity as infrastructure complexity outpaces the capacity of manual administration. The conference examines how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables organisations to codify operational procedures, enforce configuration standards and respond to incidents with consistent, repeatable processes.
Automation discussions extend beyond simple task execution to address governance and collaboration challenges. As automation scales across an organisation, questions arise about who can create and modify automation content, how changes are tested before production deployment, and how automation integrates with existing change management processes. These organisational considerations often determine whether automation initiatives succeed or stall after initial pilots.
Edge computing scenarios add another dimension to automation requirements. When infrastructure extends to hundreds or thousands of remote locations, centralised management becomes essential. The programme explores how organisations deploy and maintain edge infrastructure at scale while maintaining security and compliance standards.
Security Across Distributed Environments
Security considerations permeate every aspect of modern enterprise infrastructure, and the conference addresses how organisations can maintain robust security postures across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Container security, supply chain integrity and runtime protection feature in technical sessions aimed at security architects and operations teams.
The open source development model offers specific security advantages that the programme explores in detail. With source code available for inspection, organisations can verify security claims rather than relying solely on vendor attestations. Community-driven security research often identifies and addresses vulnerabilities faster than proprietary alternatives, though this requires organisations to maintain effective patch management processes.
Who Should Attend
The conference serves multiple constituencies within enterprise IT organisations. Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers will find strategic content addressing technology investment decisions and organisational transformation. Cloud architects and infrastructure specialists can explore technical implementation details and learn from peer experiences. Developers and DevOps practitioners benefit from sessions covering application development patterns, container technologies and automation practices.
Industry representation typically spans financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, automotive, manufacturing and public sector organisations. These sectors share common challenges around regulatory compliance, data protection and the need to modernise legacy systems while maintaining operational stability. The customer success stories featured in the programme provide concrete examples of how similar organisations have addressed these challenges.
The Open Source Approach to Enterprise Technology
Throughout the conference, the open source development model serves as a unifying theme connecting discussions of AI, cloud infrastructure, automation and security. This approach offers enterprises flexibility that proprietary alternatives cannot match, allowing organisations to customise solutions to their specific requirements, avoid vendor lock-in and participate in communities that shape technology direction.
For organisations evaluating their technology strategies, the event provides an opportunity to understand how open source solutions have matured to meet enterprise requirements for support, security and scalability. The combination of community innovation and commercial backing addresses concerns that historically limited open source adoption in mission-critical environments.

