Red Hat Summit Connect: Sovereign Support and Virtualization Moving Forward

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At the Summit Connect in Darmstadt, Red Hat not only showcased new products but also offered deep insights into the strategies of major German companies. Amidst Volkswagen's bureaucracy and Rossmann's cloud migration, it became clear: the departure from legacy virtualization and the confident entry into AI are the current major IT challenges, at least from the perspective of Red Hat and its reference customers.

The topics at the "Red Hat Summit Connect" in Darmstadt went far beyond the usual container management, which the manufacturer has been successfully offering in the high-end segment for several years with its flagship product OpenShift. Gregor von Jagow, Country Manager Germany, opened the event to an audience visibly seeking answers to three pressing questions: How can my AI remain data protection compliant? How can I free myself from the "Broadcom grip" on virtualization? And how can I move AI from the playground to production?

Red Hat underscored that digital sovereignty is more than just a political statement with figures from a recent study: for 80 percent of German companies surveyed, the topic is now a top priority, ahead of security (79 percent) and hybrid or multi-cloud (78 percent). In line with this, "Red Hat Confirmed Sovereign Support" was introduced. This offering specifically targets EU customers with high compliance requirements (authorities, critical infrastructure). Red Hat contractually guarantees that support data (logs, coredumps, etc.) will not leave the EU and will be processed exclusively by individuals within the EU.

With this, Red Hat aims to address the concerns of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who often fear a latent loss of control with US tech giants. Furthermore, the open-source provider wants to differentiate itself from "proprietary, sovereign offerings" which, according to the manufacturer, are based on software with closed source code and opaque architectures. Red Hat believes its tech stack, based entirely on open-source software with OpenShift, Ansible, Podman, Kubernetes, and the support of the open-source community, is well-equipped to support organizations on their path to digital sovereignty.

To achieve this, Red Hat has formed strategic partnerships with German cloud providers: StackIT, Ionos, and SysEleven offer Red Hat services, enabling their use on sovereign clouds in Germany. Ionos and SysEleven specialize in operating Red Hat OpenShift in the cloud. SysEleven, as part of secunet Security Networks AG, enables the operation of Red Hat OpenShift on the BSI-approved SINA Cloud, which meets the strict requirements for the classifications VS-NfD (Classified Information - For Official Use Only) and SECRET.

Volkswagen: AI Against the Bureaucracy Jungle

One of the most exciting practical insights was provided by a presentation from Volkswagen AG. Under the title "AI Despite Bureaucracy," Eike Holtz, Virtualization Technology Specialist at Volkswagen, demonstrated how the automotive giant uses Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed (a GenAI assistant) to reduce internal hurdles.

The problem at VW is typical of German corporations: hundreds of laws and internal compliance regulations make IT processes slow and cumbersome. The use of AI assistants here is not primarily intended to write code, but rather to serve as "help for self-help" for the platform's internal customers. An interesting side note: while the number of support tickets has not yet decreased, the quality of feedback and the speed of resolution for users have noticeably increased.

Rossmann: Away from VMware, Towards Hybrid Cloud

Keynote attendees gained deep insights into the cloud strategy of the drugstore chain Rossmann. The title "From Legacy to Leadership" was quite literal. Rossmann is undertaking a massive migration away from traditional virtualization solutions (the VMware logo prominently appeared in the "Legacy" section of the slides) towards a modern, container-centric application platform.

Rossmann is adopting a hybrid approach: Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO) in the cloud and OpenShift on-premises. The goal is to manage VMs and containers uniformly ("OpenShift Virtualization"). This reflects a broader trend at the conference: many companies are using the current market turmoil surrounding Broadcom/VMware to fundamentally rethink their virtualization strategy and migrate VMs as "second-class containers" into Kubernetes environments.

This is certainly an interesting approach, but it is not yet suitable as a complete replacement for an existing VMware landscape in all possible customer scenarios, as the ecosystem around the kubevirt-based platform OpenShift Virtualization still needs some time to mature.

Intel technologically flanked the event. Hans Roth (Red Hat) and Andreas Timm (Intel) emphasized the close integration of software and hardware for AI workloads. The focus was on Intel's AI accelerator Gaudi 3. The message was clear: for inference workloads and fine-tuning models (like Llama 2/3), the expensive and scarce GPU competition is not always necessary. Intel is positioning Gaudi 3 with aggressive performance-per-watt and price-performance promises, especially in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI).

Support for AI Projects and Training

Valentina Kerst, Managing Director of the German AI Association, emphasized the strategic importance of digital sovereignty in the emerging AI era in her presentation. SMEs that need support in implementing AI projects can receive help from the Academy for Artificial Intelligence. According to Kerst, this is a project of the German AI Association together with regional partners such as the Mittelstand-Digital-Zentrum Franken, which is supported by universities in Nuremberg and Ansbach, among others.

In the accompanying exhibition, Red Hat also presented its training offerings around RHEL, containers, OpenShift, and Ansible. With the Red Hat Academy, the company addresses academic partners as well as schools. Red Hat provides extensive courses here, partly as complete video courses partly as eLearning, including lab environments, free of charge. According to Red Hat, over 80,000 students worldwide use the offering; in Germany, around 20 schools, universities, and colleges are members of the program.

Realism Instead of Hype

Overall, the Summit Connect in Darmstadt conveyed a pragmatic impression. The wild experimentation phases of AI seem to be over. Now it's about integration, compliance, and hard infrastructure decisions. With Red Hat AI 3 (focused on edge inference), sovereign support, and strong partners like Microsoft and Intel, Red Hat is successfully positioning itself as the "infrastructure advocate" for European companies that want innovation but cannot ignore regulation.

(mma)