Red Hat Summit 2026 once again brought together the global open source ecosystem in Atlanta, uniting IT leaders, developers, and infrastructure innovators to discuss the future of hybrid cloud, AI, and enterprise automation.

For OpenNebula Systems, this year’s edition was a key opportunity to engage directly with the industry professionals, strengthen partner relationships, and showcase how we are helping organizations build scalable, sovereign, and cost-efficient cloud infrastructures for modern workloads.

A Strong Presence on the Expo Floor

At our booth, the team had the chance to connect with a wide range of attendees, from enterprise customers to technology partners and infrastructure leaders across the industry. We also showcased live demos, giving attendees a hands-on look at OpenNebula’s latest capabilities in action.

The level of engagement reflected a clear industry trend: organizations are actively reassessing their infrastructure strategies, looking for platforms that offer greater control, flexibility, and long-term sustainability. Many conversations at the summit also reflected the growing demand for open alternatives to VMware, as organizations look to reduce complexity, avoid vendor lock-in and regain greater control over their infrastructure.

Beyond customer conversations, the booth also became a natural meeting point for partner discussions, technical exchanges, and strategic alignment across the ecosystem.

Explore how organizations are moving beyond legacy virtualization with OpenNebula as an open alternative to VMware here.

Key Themes from Red Hat Summit 2026

Across keynotes and conversations at the summit, a few clear industry priorities stood out. Sovereign cloud continues to gain momentum as organizations seek greater control over their infrastructure, data, and deployment models, particularly in regulated and distributed environments. At the same time, hybrid and edge architectures are becoming the standard approach, increasing the need for consistent orchestration across diverse infrastructure environments.

OpenNebula’s approach as an open alternative to VMware strongly resonated with attendees exploring more flexible and cost-efficient virtualization strategies. This was especially relevant in discussions around OpenShift, where it became clear that a Kubernetes-first approach alone is not enough. There was strong demand for integration with OpenShift to enable a true end-to-end open stack across virtualization, cloud, containers, and edge environments.

These priorities closely align with our mission to deliver an open and flexible platform for modern cloud infrastructure, helping organizations build scalable, sovereign, and cost-efficient alternatives to legacy virtualization solutions.

Strengthening Our Embedded Partnership with Red Hat

A key highlight of the summit was reinforcing our embedded partnership with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

This collaboration is a foundational pillar of OpenNebula’s enterprise offering, enabling tight integration with a trusted open source stack and ensuring that customers can deploy and operate cloud environments with confidence, stability, and full lifecycle support.

At Red Hat Summit, this partnership was once again validated through discussions with customers and ecosystem partners who increasingly see value in deeply integrated, open, and interoperable infrastructure stacks. As Red Hat continues to expand its focus on sovereign and private cloud capabilities, OpenNebula complements this vision by providing a flexible orchestration layer that helps organizations operationalize those principles in real-world environments.

Looking Ahead

Red Hat Summit 2026 confirmed what is becoming increasingly clear across the industry: the future of infrastructure is open, distributed, and sovereignty-driven.

At OpenNebula, we are committed to continuing to build in that direction by expanding our ecosystem, deepening strategic partnerships like our embedded collaboration with Red Hat, and helping organizations modernize their infrastructure without sacrificing control or efficiency.

We’re already looking forward to continuing these conversations throughout the year and at next year’s summit.