“If you look at the core of where we started with OpenShift, it was an efficiency play. [This is] a great area for partners. Instead of just assuming a deal or progress can’t happen because the hardware is delayed, rethinking that to say, ‘OK, if this is AI hardware, I’m going to have to be pretty good at containers to utilize it well,’” says Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks.
Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks sees opportunities for solution providers navigating the component supply chain crisis and heightened security concerns around the capabilities of artificial intelligence models like Anthropic’s Mythos.
As solution providers and their customers navigate rising memory prices and constrained supply, the need for getting more out of existing infrastructure creates an opportunity for Red Hat and its ecosystem.
“If you look at the core of where we started with OpenShift, it was an efficiency play,” Hicks told CRN in an interview. “[This is] a great area for partners. Instead of just assuming a deal or progress can’t happen because the hardware is delayed, rethinking that to say, ‘OK, if this is AI hardware, I’m going to have to be pretty good at containers to utilize it well.’”
Red Hat solution providers have a chance to improve customers’ patching processes, future-proofing infrastructure for AI, and building trust with customers with holistic technology products and services, Hicks said.
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Red Hat Opportunities In Component Crisis, Security
Wes Brown, CTO of Brentwood, Tenn.-based solution provider Arctiq—No. 80 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500 and a CRN 2026 MSP 500 honoree—told CRN in a recent interview that Red Hat’s hybrid cloud and software stack has been a growing opportunity for the solution provider.
Red Hat has been a key partner for Arctiq in helping customers navigate data center optimization and whether to deploy in the cloud or on-premises.
“Everyone thinks the data center ends inside of the four walls—or eight walls if you’ve got proper DR [disaster recovery] and you have got two different data centers,” Brown said. “That’s how we get creative with that. It’s an exciting place that we get to play in where we can be consultative with our customers.”
VMware Migrations Continue To Drive Red Hat Growth
In a recent interview with CRN, Red Hat Channel Chief Kevin Kennedy said migrations from virtualization giant VMware continue to present opportunities for solution providers.
Solution providers can pursue more holistic customer conversations around autonomy and flexibility in AI and with containers and Red Hat’s product portfolio.
“You can go off VMware onto something else that’s more of a like for like, but you’re going to do something else again two years from now to prepare you for the next iteration,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy also pointed to Red Hat’s growing partnerships with Nvidia, Cisco Systems, Dell Technologies and other vendors as opening more doors for solution providers.
“The customer doesn’t want to piecemeal it anymore,” the channel chief said. “They want us to come together and say, ‘You guys figure out your own lines of demarcation. But I just want to know that I’ve got something that’s been tested, that works, that’s proven. And it’s going to solve my problem. And I have got a one-stop shop to get it.’”
Red Hat users can avoid vendor lock-in and work between cloud and on-premises environments with the same operating system, said Kennedy, whose official title is vice president of the global partner ecosystem.
Offerings like Red Hat AI Enterprise and Red Hat AI Factory with Nvidia also present ways to better control token consumption as prices change, with Kennedy likening this phase of AI cost controls to the early days of cloud computing and customers figuring out how to budget for consumption.
“That’s what we’re trying to focus on—provide the system-centric mindset to do that,” he said.
Lightwell Targets AI-Era Open-Source Security Risks
Red Hat’s CEO said that efforts like Lightwell to speed up patching open-source software to assuage concerns around the ability of powerful AI models to quickly exploit a massive number of vulnerabilities ensures enterprise trust in open source and opens opportunities for solution providers.
Hicks said partners play an important role with Lightwell—a joint effort by Red Hat and its parent company IBM—as well as broadly rethinking protection at the edge, perimeter, network, application level and across IT estates.
Lightwell comes at a time when AI models like Anthropic’s Mythos challenge the previous benefit of open-source software having a large community of users policing quality and security. AI now means vendors like Red Hat need to find exploits before threat actors can take advantage—with Hicks noting that proprietary software faces the same issue but with less visibility compared with open source.
“We have GSIs [global systems integrators] from Deloitte to IBM Consulting saying, ‘Well, if you don’t know how to scan and where your problems are, where can you start to help?’” Hicks said. “There are so many exciting things AI could do, but if we don’t deal with this one first, chasing future opportunities is probably a bit risky.”
Hicks sees more segmentation and packaging options for Lightwell in the future, he said. The focus on security also gives solution providers a chance to educate customers on how much of the work Red Hat takes on scanning Linux and Kubernetes, for example, for the latest vulnerabilities.
Hicks said he is still bullish on the role of open source in enterprise IT even with enterprises concerned around the exploitation capabilities of models like Mythos.
“It’ll be a great outcome for open source because that transparency drives hygiene,” Hicks said. “The exploitability of seeing it is driving better processes. And we’ll just end up with the best software development practices in the world in open source. … [But] is this breadth of, ‘I use anything I grab from the internet, and I trust it?’—I do think those days are over.”
