What’s the future of open-source technology, and what innovation is taking place in the information technology landscape?

Those were the big questions to be answered during this year’s Red Hat Summit event, which ran from May 23-24, along with AnsibleFest.

During a final breakdown of the event, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, provided an analysis that summed it up, at least when it came to Red Hat Inc.: In an increasingly multicloud environment, the company is seeking to harness open-source power. Much of this traces back to IBM Corp.’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2019 and how the company is moving forward with hybrid cloud, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier.

“They’re confident. They’re putting the results out there,” he said. “Customers, products, partnerships. Open source has exploded, and artificial intelligence was a nice tailwind.”

In addition to Furrier, industry analysts Rob Strechay and Paul Gillin talked about the future of cloud computing, the adoption of open hybrid cloud and the various partnerships at play during theCUBE’s coverage of the event. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed:

1. Open source could play a key role in a multicloud world.

There’s no question that open source and Red Hat go hand-in-hand. But advances in AI have posed some big questions, particularly around regulation, which Furrier and industry analyst Dave Vellante have discussed on past episodes of theCUBE podcast.

But the question is: What is a guardrail, and how do customers navigate it?

“I think it ties back to the whole wanting to own multicloud, hybrid cloud, every cloud, be everywhere and open source winning and being there,” Strechay said. “That’s why it ties back with their OpenShift AI, the fact that they love to talk about that there was no YAML used in the demo for that.”

They’re looking for it to be hybrid because no one really knows where AI is going to live in all of that data, according to Strechay. Still, Furrier said when he hears people say things such as, “I’m going to build a horizontal layer between the Azure Stack and Amazon,” it reminds him of old gateways.

“When I hear multicloud, I kind of get a gut-wrenching feeling. Like, is it going to be slow? Is that really viable?” he said.

There’s a lot of hype and a lot of promise around multicloud, but it all comes down to homegrown code, according to Gillin. There’s also value from a governance and compliance perspective, Strechay added.

“Google Analytics has been outlawed in five countries in the European Union,” he said, adding that data has weight and gravity, but it also has regulation that comes with it. “I think AI is just going to make that such an almost untenable problem for people.”

What is the role of Red Hat in a world seeing more and more AI and automation? A few guests during the event mentioned a focus on domain-specific AI.

“This idea of the whole training and AI model and the whole internet has its flaws, and they’re not focused on trying to duplicate that,” Gillin said. “They’re using AI for just Ansible or just for OpenShift.”

Red Hat is positioned to be a major player in the future and a major broker in the cloud world, according to Gillin.

“I think what jumped out to me was that the AI’s transfused. I think the multicloud is going to be a big play where it kind of clicks together. They’ve kind of got hybrid right,” Furrier said. “I think they could shepherd open source with the AI wave. And, I think, if they get that with the hybrid, IBM is Red Hat.”

Here’s the complete video analysis with John Furrier, Rob Strechay and Paul Gillin, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit event:

2. Open-source innovation is being tied to AI.

Though theCUBE has been closely tracking AI for more than a year now, in the past few months there’s been more and more hype and impacts. Meanwhile, in a recently leaked document, a senior Google engineer warned that Google LLC and ChatGPT developer OpenAI LP face increasing competition from open-source developers in the field of generative AI.

It’s fascinating to watch what’s happening, according to Matt Hicks, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, adding that the open-source innovation reminds him of what he saw with Linux.

“How you saw it grow and people contributing, and that impact and power with it. [We’re] seeing the exact same thing in AI,” Hicks said. “But it’s a hundred times faster than I experienced with Linux. I think it will become the innovation model for AI. And as an open-source guy, it’s an exciting thing that I think will impact development and operations, different core business models that we work with.”

As the speed of innovation with AI continues to increase, open source should be viewed as an organic model that can grow and adapt naturally, according to Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president of global engineering at Red Hat. That’s not to say that AI won’t create pressure. But open source development is all about growing through people, according to Wright.

“We’re not at a place where we’re replacing the creativity of humans. This is about machine-assisted human intelligence,” he said. “I think of it as you and I have the exact same skillset; we have the same task in mind. You start with a well-drafted rough draft; I start with a blank sheet of paper. You’re going to move a lot faster than I am. And that’s what we’re doing with AI.”

As AI continues to develop, so do technological solutions to the challenges that come with enterprise computing. At the conference, Red Hat discussed its open hybrid cloud that enables workloads to be run consistently across various footprints, including the edge, on-premise and the cloud. It’s an effort to eliminate tasks, such as rebuilding applications, maintaining disparate environments and retraining people, according to Stefanie Chiras (pictured), senior vice president of partner ecosystem success at Red Hat.

“The real strength of open hybrid cloud is that it’s tailored to any customer for where they are on their journey and what they need to do, whether or not they want to use a managed service,” she said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Stefanie Chiras:

3. Partnerships continue to be a big emphasis.

In open source, there’s no question that partnerships have long been a key point of emphasis. Red Hat has often championed its own partner ecosystem, and various examples of those partnerships were on display at the Red Hat Summit. One of those involves a partnership between Red Hat and Microsoft Corp., which has been in place for around a decade. It’s one where Microsoft customers are Red Hat customers and vice versa, according to Jeremy Winter, corporate vice president of Azure cloud-native and hybrid at Microsoft.

“Clearly, we’re seeing the enterprise customer look to Red Hat and Microsoft as the important vendors that they’re betting with for their strategic compute fabric of the future,” he said. “Whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud, these two have really popped over the course of the last two or three years as both cloud and Red Hat have come into the picture.”

Edge computing has always presented challenges and security concerns, but as AI has become more capable, so too has the capacity for IT infrastructures to meld with operational technology for edge-driven transformation at scale, according to Christine Boles, vice president of the Network and Edge Group and general manager of federal and industrial solutions at Intel Corp.

The partnership between Red Hat and Intel that sees OT/IT convergence driving edge transformation has been ongoing for almost a decade, according to Darrell Jordan-Smith, senior vice president of industries and edge at Red Hat.

Other partnerships have helped companies start their transformation journeys, such as a partnership between Red Hat and IBM when it comes to health insurance service provider Elevance Health Inc.

“When we looked at digital experiences, the big challenge we faced had [to do] with our core systems,” said Reddi Gudla, staff vice president of digital engineering at Elevance. “We needed to modernize and recognized the need to digitize our core applications. To me, the biggest pain point is developing a strategy to deliver better digital experiences.”

Of course, migrating to the cloud is only the first step in the modernization journey, and Red Hat, Accenture PLC and Amazon Web Services Inc. have sought to utilize the “power of the three” to make the journey more seamless, according to David Rojas, global alliance executive at Red Hat.

“AWS, obviously, has the cloud platform, tons of cloud-native services, integrations with our products. Accenture … has global expertise in how to implement, how to get these things out. And, of course, Red Hat; we bring the open hybrid cloud story,” Rojas said.

Here’s theCUBE’s full interview with David Rojas and Rob Buchanan, principal solution architect at AWS:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE