Open enterprise hybrid cloud is no longer a buzzword — it’s the answer enterprises are landing on as AI workloads, sovereignty mandates and a decade of accumulated Windows-Linux complexity finally demand a reckoning.

The Microsoft Corp. and Red Hat Inc. partnership has been quietly evolving for a decade, but the convergence of AI, virtualization modernization and hybrid cloud complexity has given it fresh momentum. What was once a surprising alliance is now maturing into a deeply integrated platform play that customers are actively shaping, according to Campbell Vertesi (pictured), chief technology officer for the Microsoft and Red Hat partnership at Microsoft.

“Because our universes were so separate for so long, but we approach the exact same customer base … we end up with a lot of complementary strengths,” Vertesi said. “What I’m hearing from customers is, ‘OK, in my hybrid environment, how do I actually get the best of both worlds?'”

Vertesi spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Rebecca Knight at the Red Hat Summit 2026 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the open enterprise hybrid cloud strategy, AI-driven platform modernization and the next chapter for the Microsoft-Red Hat partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Open enterprise hybrid cloud as the new platform mandate

The partnership’s evolving answer to customer complexity is the “open enterprise hybrid cloud” — a model where Red Hat and Microsoft Azure estates feel like native extensions of each other rather than parallel silos, according to Vertesi. That vision is being validated in production today. Banco Bradesco S.A., which recently won a platform innovation award with Microsoft and Red Hat, built an internal AI platform where developers can provision any AI model or backend service through Azure AI governance running underneath. That unified governance layer isn’t slowing enterprises down — it’s accelerating them.

“They got to … 100 AI services in production within one year, 200 by the second year,” he said. “I just heard at the award show the other night, they’re at 500 plus now. That’s two and a half years. Those are in production, compliant, audit-ready solutions. That is amazing — and it’s only possible when you embrace that level of customizability and using both of the stacks together to get exactly what you need.”

Virtualization modernization is another pillar of the strategy. Microsoft and Red Hat reached general availability of OpenShift Virtualization on Azure Red Hat OpenShift in 2025, giving enterprises a path to migrate virtual machines alongside containers on a single managed platform without rearchitecting every application, Vertesi explained. That milestone now extends the partnership’s immediate time-to-value promise directly into customers’ cloud estates.

“You migrate your VMs over as-is and you get all of the cloud-native operations,” he said. “You don’t have to containerize everything. That’s nuts. You can do this horizontal containerization — if you find that 30% of your VMs are using MySQL, then you build a container for MySQL and standardize that and pull out just that piece of your VMs. Only OpenShift Virt can do that.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit 2026 event:

(* Disclosure: Red Hat sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE