Cloud is becoming the core operating model for innovation in 2026

MANGESH SURVE
SR. DIRECTOR – SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE AND TECH SALES, RED HAT INDIA

“Cloud has moved well beyond infrastructure economics. What we are seeing in 2026 is the cloud becoming the core operating model for innovation, the platform on which enterprises are building their next competitive positions. Companies are not debating whether to transform; they are asking how to do it without losing control of their data, infrastructure, or vendor relationships.

That is where Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud model becomes relevant. India’s enterprise reality is not uniform—whether it is a large public sector bank, a telecom operator building AI-driven self-healing networks, or a manufacturing company running edge workloads at disconnected sites, all have different infrastructure realities. This is where Red Hat OpenShift comes into play, enabling customers to build, modernize, and deploy applications at scale on their choice of hybrid cloud infrastructure.

On the AI front, about 70 to 80 percent of enterprises have already run pilots, and the decisive shift from experimentation to production will define 2026 and 2027. With Red Hat AI Enterprise, our metal-to-agent platform, enterprises can develop and scale AI across any hybrid environment. Through enterprise open source and Kubernetes, we help organisations standardise operations and orchestrate workloads, while open source ensures a transparent security posture. India is not just another cloud market; it is one of the most consequential digital transformation stories, and we aim to be the platform enabling it.”