The information technology landscape is constantly shifting, with new trends emerging around automation for DevOps and container management, as well as serverless reemerges. Open-source transformations, in particular, are a big part of this shift.

The future of open-source technology will be a main subject of discussion during this year’s Red Hat Summit in Boston. This year, there will be plenty of innovation to keep tabs on, including when it comes to virtualization, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier.

“There’s a migration going on between enterprise IT and virtualization shifting to cloud-native,” Furrier said. “Even though that’s a hot area, the great migration is coming — from virtualization to cloud-native.”

During a Red Hat Summit preview interview, Furrier spoke with Ashesh Badani, chief product officer of Red Hat Inc. During the event, the company will share elements of how it will be successful in getting enterprises to adopt commercial open source with Linux or with Kubernetes, and then apply that to the world of AI.

“I am really bullish on the ability for open source to play a big role,” Badani said. “The market opportunity is so massive, the interest is so massive that this is a multiple of some of the other waves of interesting technology that we’ve seen so far today.”

The conversation around what comes next will be underway during theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit, which runs May 23-24, along with AnsibleFest. During the event, Furrier and theCUBE analyst team will discuss what new trends are emerging and talk with industry leaders about what comes next in open source. (* Disclosure below.)

Here’s the full event preview interview with Ashesh Badani:

Red Hat faring well

Red Hat Inc. has stated that it sees a hybrid cloud future shaped by innovation generated by the open-source ecosystem. In recent months, it has seen some recognition for its role in infrastructure automation, having been named a leader in the space by Forrester Research Inc. in March.

“Red Hat sets the pace of the market by addressing operational challenges, skill gaps and budgetary pressures. Its strength lies in its community, which has led to solid partnerships and supporting services. Red Hat capitalizes on this ecosystem by adopting and embracing the work of contributors,” Forrester’s evaluation reads.

IBM Corp. acquired Red Hat in October 2018 for $34 billion, with a key focus being paid to the Kubernetes container management platform. That strategy is going well, according to Furrier.

“Their story is enterprise-readiness. The idea of cloud-native developer productivity is big,” he said.

IBM, meanwhile, posted revenues of $16.69 billion earlier this year, slightly down from $16.7 billion a year earlier. That rose 6% in constant-currency terms and was well ahead of its consensus estimates of $16.15 billion. Still, the company said it would lay off about 3,900 employees, or about 1.5% of its workforce, amid a potential looming global recession.

Other recent developments with Red Hat are worth keeping tabs on too. In the wake of the global pandemic, ensuring reliability in the telecom field is top of mind. That point led to a recent team-up between Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat, with a stated goal of evolving open telecom networks.

“A key element of an engineered system is this experience that [companies] get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one, which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation,” said Tony Jeffries, senior director of product management of the Telecom System Business at Dell.

Open-source transformations

The Red Hat Summit will run concurrent with this year’s AnsibleFest, with a stated goal to provide more opportunities to see what’s next in automation, whether that involves infrastructure, app development or edge computing. Automation is moving at a breakneck pace these days. By 2025, 85 million jobs will be displaced by automation and technology advances, according to the World Economic Forum’s predictions. At the same time, it is expected to create 97 million new roles.

Robotic process automation has become a transformation catalyst, according to Vellante during an episode of his Breaking Analysis series last year.

“Automation today is attacking not only the labor shortage, but its support optimizations in ESG, supply chain, helping with inflation challenges and improving capital allocation,” Vellante said.

In recent months, Red Hat has also stated its goals to stretch across advanced 5G, telecommunications clouds, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, radio-access networks and energy efficiency. At the MWC event in March in Barcelona, Red Hat said it was collaborating with Nvidia Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and U.K. chip designer Arm Ltd. in an effort to develop efficient, open networks.

At that time, Red Hat said that OpenShift, its enterprise Kubernetes platform, had added support for Nvidia’s converged accelerators and Aerial SDK with a goal of helping companies build more powerful 5G virtual radio access networks and other enterprise applications, while delivering a “composable infrastructure.” That would allow organizations to support heavier compute demands of applications for edge computing, AI, private 5G and more, according to Red Hat.

What comes next, and what will be the themes to watch at this year’s Red Hat Summit? Along with virtualization, serverless is also now making a comeback, according to Furrier.

“You’ve got WebAssembly in cloud-native trending and other projects around databases, putting more pressure on enterprises to have a more reliable developer partner,” he said.

The landscape of IT is indeed changing in every industry. TheCUBE will be on-site at Red Hat Summit to capture all the breaking news and real-time analysis. You can follow theCUBE’s wall-to-wall coverage for firsthand insights.

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit on May 23-24. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

Stay tuned for theCUBE’s complete guest list during Red Hat Summit here.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Red Hat Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE