Dion Harvey, regional GM at Red Hat, sub-Saharan Africa.
Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are foundational to the current global “technology arms race”, said Dion Harvey, regional GM of Red Hat SSA.
Speaking at the company’s partner and customer focused Connect 2025 Johannesburg Summit at Melrose Arch this week, Harvey reiterated the company’s focus on open source and hybrid cloud technology, and the growth of its partner-centric ecosystem to support businesses as they operate in increasingly competitive markets.
He said global markets today are characterised by tech-driven heightened competition between countries, companies and individuals, which he described as a hype-fuelled “technology arms race”.
“There’s no question that there is an incredible amount of hype. I know we’re an industry of waves, but this one feels like something else. When I look at the hype, I ask myself, where does hype meet reality and how do we harness innovation in a way that is real and practical for us right here, today?
“Open is still the core of our ethos,” Harvey continued, adding that the company’s strategy is to construct resilient, power platforms to enable users to build, run and manage automated environments.
Opportunity in transition
Brian Gracely, senior director, portfolio strategy at Red Hat, said about every 10 years, markets go through an industry and technology transition, which brings with it challenge and opportunity.
“We are in an interesting time… if you’ve been paying attention at all, you’ll know we are at the very beginning of one of those transitions; we are sort of in the middle of the cloud era and the beginning of the AI era.”
While exciting – especially for technologists – with new technology, protocols, products, ideas and innovations, there is also the need to clear up any confusion, said Gracely.
…We are sort of in the middle of the cloud era and the beginning of the AI era.
Brian Gracely, Red Hat
Red Hat is focused on helping organisations better understand emerging technologies. It constructed its technology portfolio based on lessons learnt from the cloud era over the past 10 years, including that the location of services is important.
Gracely said it should not matter where a business defines and leverages services, be it private cloud, public cloud, sovereign cloud or multiple environments – the process should be streamlined, secure, consistent and comfortable.
He emphasised the need for consistency across these locations. “Whether it is how we automate, how we deploy, how we look at our day-to-day operations and how we do security – the more consistent we can be, the more efficient we can be.”
Innovation is happening on a rapid scale, said Gracely, and it is important that businesses keep tabs on what is happening in open source and cloud communities, and that these environments work well.
“Most importantly, it’s about collaboration. If there is anything we’ve learnt over the past 10 years, it’s the need for collaboration across all teams – SecOps, DevOps, FinOps, etc.”
Bruce Busansky, application platform specialist at Red Hat SSA, added that the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 offering is critical to its Openshift virtualisation drive, modernising virtualisation infrastructure and helping its market to grow infrastructure at scale.
He referred to the company’s work with Middle East financial services provider Emirates NBD to implement real-world, large-scale virtualisation migration.
As a result of implementing standardised migration infrastructure and services, the financial services provider migrated 9 000 virtual machines, 70% of its app landscape running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, on average 140 virtual machines migrated per night, and 37 000 containers operating on Openshift.
