Events
Accelerating growth at Ecosystem Success Day 2026
Red Hat's Ecosystem Success Day 2026 focused on exploring how open collaboration and innovation are reshaping customer value and fostering mutual profitability. The half-day event emphasized that speeding business growth relies heavily on a thriving network of partners.
Winning together
During the keynote, Red Hat Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Brown and VP, Global Partner Ecosystem Kevin Kennedy highlighted that succeeding in the market is a "team sport." Red Hat is ramping up partner support by focusing on 3 core disciplines: relentless prioritization, momentum to mastery, and being unstoppable together.
To reinforce this commitment, Red Hat is fueling partner growth through enhanced incentive programs. Key strategies include:
- Doubling down on specialized partners who lead the full sales and customer lifecycle.
- Offering structured incentives that reward partners across the entire sales cycle, from the initial assessment to renewal.
- Aligning resources with partners to reward long-term investment in critical areas like AI, independent software vendors (ISVs), and distribution.
At the core of this growth are foundational building blocks like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. These products act as essential "hooks" to establish relationships, automate environments, and ultimately set the stage for advanced AI integration.
Celebrating the winners of the 2026 Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Awards
Recognizing the power of teamwork, the keynote announced the winners of the 2026 Red Hat Ecosystem Innovation Awards, honoring partners who have moved beyond experimentation to deliver breakthrough results for our joint customers:
- AI Visionary Partner of the Year: Google Cloud optimized the vLLM-serving engine on its custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) infrastructure, cutting costs on critical safety workloads by 92%.
- Automation Accelerator Partner of the Year: One Technology used Ansible Automation Platform to help clients bridge massive skills gaps and orchestrate complex infrastructure workflows.
- Container Champion of the Year: Logicalis Spain used Red Hat OpenShift as a consistent execution layer to design a multicloud disaster recovery architecture for an international tourism group.
- Hybrid Cloud Everywhere Partner of the Year: Capgemini created a repeatable blueprint for the highly regulated banking sector by replacing outdated systems with a coengineered Containers-as-a-Service model, reducing provisioning cycles by 85%.
- Platform Modernization Partner of the Year: Microsoft used Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift to help a large Latin American bank integrate generative AI, scaling to support more than 500 active AI initiatives.
- Virtualization Transformation Partner of the Year: Everpure combined Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization with Portworx to migrate thousands of virtual machines, reducing the total cost of ownership by 38%.
The AI flywheel: Cisco, NTT DATA, and Red Hat
A major highlight of the keynote was a fireside chat featuring Cisco's Cassie Roach and NTT DATA's Jeff Ehrenhart. The discussion explored the decade-long alliance among Red Hat, Cisco, and NTT DATA, and how they’re helping customers shift from AI experimentation to production-grade deployment.
A central theme of the panel was the "flywheel effect," which starts with NVIDIA and acts as the unifying factor among the companies. This collaborative process works in 4 steps:
- NVIDIA builds the hardware and libraries.
- Red Hat stabilizes the software.
- Cisco secures the infrastructure that connects it to the network.
- NTT DATA deploys these solutions in real-world factories.
The keynote concluded with remarks by guest speaker Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia, before attendees transitioned into targeted breakout sessions covering coselling, AI, automation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and virtualization.
Major product launches
Red Hat’s product portfolio saw some upgrades this year, emphasizing the theme of ecosystem success. To ensure your sales and technical teams are prepared for these new releases, we've compiled this summary that consolidates the core capability of each new product, clarifies the strategic value it brings to your business, and details the specific partner activation resources available, so you can immediately start having successful customer conversations.
Red Hat product | The “big news” | Benefit to partners | Resources |
AI-assisted Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades with Ansible Automation Platform | AI-guided automation for in-place operating system upgrades, achieved through a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrade system role and available as a Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection. This tool automates complex upgrades by packaging accumulated best practices into a "fail fast, then iterate" approach, which reduces downtime and limits human error. | Simplifies deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux best practices and allows for self-service upgrades using Ansible Automation Platform, resulting in a smoother and more reliable upgrade experience.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux Long-Life Add-On
| A valuable, yearly extended maintenance offering exclusively for customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle, Premium subscriptions. | Helps ensure customer stability and compliance by offering crucial, multiyear extended maintenance. This support includes security patches and bug fixes (e.g., for critical, important, and moderate CVEs with a CVSS score of 7 or higher) for specific Red Hat Enterprise Linux minor and major versions after their standard 4-year maintenance period ends, providing support for customers who delay upgrades. |
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA
| The latest updates introduce enhanced security capabilities for continuously operating agents and deliver ready-to-deploy solutions that help organizations move from experimentation to production faster and with confidence.
| Key benefits for partners include strategic coengineering and shared resources. Together they provide the architectural control and open source innovation necessary to confidently scale agentic AI, delivering a sovereign, consistent, zero trust foundation across the hybrid cloud. This approach accelerates time-to-value because partners can use validated, codeveloped resources to simplify the deployment of complex AI patterns and guide critical use cases. | |
Red Hat AI 3.4 | Major updates to inference control, agent safety and observability, centralized AI governance, and enhanced data connection/model evaluation. | This release generates immediate consulting and deployment opportunities across cost optimization, governance, security, and quality assurance for large-scale AI deployments. | |
Ansible Automation Platform 2.7 | Red Hat is bridging skills gaps with AI-guided automation for in-place operating system upgrades via a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrade system role. This tool automates complex upgrades using a "fail fast, then iterate" approach, reducing downtime and human error. It enables self-service upgrades through Ansible Automation Platform, providing a smoother and more reliable experience. | Focus on strategic business outcomes like cost optimization and revenue growth and build long-lasting relationships that support cross-selling other Red Hat technologies. |
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Red Hat Hardened Images | Provides a vendor-neutral catalog of micro-sized, near zero-CVE foundations at no cost. Customers can eliminate security noise and identify and fix issues early in the development phase, backed by Red Hat’s enterprise-grade supply chain integrity. | Hardened Images offer significant, measurable business value to customers that translates directly into faster deal cycles and faster customer deployments. | |
Red Hat build of Podman Desktop | A consistent developer experience across macOS, Windows, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Featuring Red Hat build of Podman Desktop and Kaiden, it provides security-focused workspaces for containers and AI agents, so teams can build locally and deploy confidently to the hybrid cloud.
| An essential offering for partners as it provides an enterprise-grade, fully supported solution that simplifies security-focused container and AI development from the desktop to production on Red Hat platforms. Partners can solve customer challenges around security, governance, and consistency with a product seamlessly integrated into the Red Hat ecosystem. | |
Digital sovereignty | Red Hat is expanding its sovereign and private cloud offerings to help organizations achieve digital autonomy by reclaiming authority over technology and data. This introduces standardized architectures for choice, control, and transparency. Key capabilities include simplified compliance automation for regulations, a new application programming interface (API) for rapid deployment of sovereign AI services, and on-premise telemetry for cost visibility that maintains data residency. Red Hat is localizing software delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for regional resilience and supporting a global ecosystem, including achieving AI Cloud Ready status for the NVIDIA Cloud Partner program. | Benefits include becoming part of a specialized ecosystem that builds sovereign AI clouds, providing localized expertise to deploy compliance-ready, high-performance AI and cloud services under local authority. Specifically, the AI Cloud Ready status for the NVIDIA Cloud Partner program helps NVIDIA partners deliver multitenant AI resources and services on demand, granting organizations full-stack control over the AI lifecycle.
New capabilities help service providers create and operate private, AI-enabled clouds through a service fulfillment API for the rapid deployment of AI services. Localized software delivery allows partners to download Red Hat Enterprise Linux locally, increasing the resilience of critical software delivery. | |
Fedora Hummingbird Linux
| The primary benefit for partners is the so-called “land and expand” opportunity. This mechanism ensures that workloads started on Fedora Hummingbird Linux ultimately transition to supported Red Hat infrastructure as they mature, bridging rapid innovation with enterprise-grade production stability. | This model lets partners engage with customers through the “land and expand” lifecycle:
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Empower your teams: A new Red Hat Certification program
Red Hat Certification is undergoing a major strategic revamp, aligning with modern technologies like AI and cloud-native applications to enhance your service delivery capabilities and seize new market opportunities. This evolution provides you with a clearer path to certification through 5 specializations—Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, cloud-native applications, and AI—so you can earn specialized Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) credentials.
The program also features a progressive 5-level career framework—from the optional, entry-level Certified Technologist (Level 1) to the Certified Architect (Level 5)—and offers flexible recertification paths that renew current credentials for 3 years. (Existing credentials stay valid, and exams and training content remain the same.)
This new framework makes explaining Red Hat certification paths to customers easier. Each product family has a clear trail from entry to expert. Enablement content for partners selling Red Hat Certification will be available in the Red Hat Content Center (login required). Learn more about this major update.
Next steps
Our commitment to your success has never been stronger: If you invest in us, we’ll invest in you. We’ll provide the tools, support, and enhanced incentives you need to succeed across the entire sales and customer lifecycle. To accelerate your growth and maximize your profitability alongside Red Hat, we encourage you to:
- Create custom marketing demand generation campaigns: Use the Red Hat Partner Demand Center to create targeted campaigns and follow up with your leads post event. Request access here.
- Align leads and accounts: Schedule time with your Red Hat account team to map Red Hat Summit leads to specific sales plays. Host a discovery session or technical workshop using product spotlights shared at Red Hat Summit.
- Reward yourself: Take advantage of incentives (login required) that span the entire customer lifecycle—from acquiring new customers to securing renewals.
- Finalize certifications: If your engineers attended hands-on labs onsite, encourage them to complete their certifications while the technical knowledge is still fresh. Use the Red Hat Partner Training Portal to stay up to date on new product releases.
Resources for ISV/technology partners:
- Read:
- Not validated yet?Start with the program:
- Try it:
- Use partner subscriptions as your account team directs.
- Go deeper:
- Book a working session—virtualization, AI, or both—and we’ll align on customer value, your go-to-market story, and joint next steps. Contact your business development manager or the Red Hat Partner Acceleration Desk (login required).
When we work as a team, we don't just win deals—we transform the market. Let's continue to innovate and achieve our goals together.
